How Draper James Drives Authentic Customer Engagement With Two-Way Text Messaging

Challenge

The COVID-19 crisis came at a particularly challenging time for Draper James, as spring special occasion dressing tied to Easter, weddings, showers, graduation, the Kentucky Derby, and more is one of its two critical sales periods each year. A drop in the purchasing of seasonal dresses was unavoidable, as customers opted for separates and the newly launched loungewear collection. With the Easter holiday approaching and knowing its customers love shopping for holiday moments, Draper James needed to create a meaningful campaign that drove demand for unsold styles without screaming “we’re on sale!”

Solution

Partner with Attentive to connect with shoppers in a more direct, engaging way—and learn what subscribers wanted. With the Easter holiday coming up and knowing the Draper James girl loves shopping for holiday moments, it was like the perfect opportunity to create a meaningful conversational campaign.

We’re not a promotional brand in general. But we wanted to think of ways that we could move inventory that we were otherwise having a little trouble with, for a specific niche reason. We want to make sure that our promotions had a reason to be and really speak—not only to the brand value—but also to what’s important to our customer.
‍
– Helen Nightingale, Director of E-Commerce, Draper James

Strategy

Draper James sent a text message to all subscribers inviting them to join a virtual Easter Egg Hunt on Draper James’ website. This campaign created an exciting and unique opportunity to engage subscribers with content specifically relevant to them.

When you give customers a choice with what they are participating in, they are going be a lot more engaged, a lot more interested, and develop a deeper connection with the brand. We see high repeat purchase rates within our SMS marketing segment.
‍
– Helen Nightingale, Director of E-Commerce, Draper James

Results

So far, Draper James’ text messaging program with Attentive has delivered an overall ROI of 29x. The brand was able to quickly grow a list of subscribers by 152% over 5 months using Attentive’s various list growth tools, allowing Draper James to instantly communicate with its shoppers. For its Easter campaign, Draper James saw a 6.37% total response rate for the initial text message; and the two messages sent as a follow up to the campaign received a 63% CTR and 31.9% CTR, respectively.