How Astrid & Miyu Drives 33x ROI Through Personalized SMS

Finding a strategic SMS partner to make shopping more personal across channels

Astrid & Miyu was looking for a new channel that would allow them to cut through the noise to reach their shoppers directly and drive incremental revenue. They knew from researching UK consumer trends that SMS marketing would be a good fit for their mobile-first shoppers. Not to mention the channel’s reputation for facilitating personalized, 1:1 customer experiences. 

Adding SMS to their marketing mix presented Astrid & Miyu with an opportunity to support their brand mission of curating the shopping experience for every customer. 

“As a brand, we’re keen on innovation and taking on new channels as quickly as possible. Marketers in the UK are seeing SMS become this place where shoppers know they're going to get the most convenient, curated, and reliable experience. We wanted to be one of the first brands in the UK to use SMS because, otherwise, we would get left behind.”
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- Lucy Kemish, Senior Global CRM Manager, Astrid & Miyu

As a lean team without any prior experience using SMS, Astrid & Miyu needed a partner that could provide high-touch support every step of the way, from quick implementation to building a sophisticated personalization strategy. The team was determined to not only uplevel their personalization efforts, but also to connect the dots across all their customer touchpoints. For example, driving SMS subscribers to stores, and orchestrating email with SMS to reach customers on their preferred channel, boosting sales and satisfaction. 

“Any marketer cares about driving incremental revenue and, ultimately, retaining as many customers as possible. Having the right channels to support that is really important.”
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- Lucy Kemish, Senior Global CRM Manager, Astrid & Miyu

With Attentive, Astrid & Miyu found the perfect partner to support their SMS journey. They had a dedicated client strategist and access to best practices, which made them feel confident they could build a winning SMS marketing strategy from day one. Attentive also integrated with Astrid & Miyu’s email service provider (Ometria) and loyalty program (LoyaltyLion), which made it easy for them to bring SMS into their overall marketing strategy. 

Their early performance goals with Attentive were simple: prove that the channel could drive incremental revenue in the first 30 days and—once the program matured—drive 10x total SMS program ROI. 

Proving that SMS drives incremental revenue from the start

After connecting Attentive with their tech stack, Astrid & Miyu started working on the foundation of their SMS program: their triggered messaging strategy. They launched their welcome series, browse abandonment reminders, and back-in-stock journeys. They also began sending one-time campaign messages to promote new jewelry collections and seasonal sales. 

Lucy Kemish, Astrid & Miyu’s Senior CRM Manager, was initially apprehensive, assuming they would need to invest a lot of time in getting their SMS program off the ground—but found that getting started with Attentive was incredibly easy. 

“Some people will tell you that a platform is ‘plug and play’ and, in the back of your mind, you think, ‘I'll have to do loads of extra work or get my development team involved.’ But with Attentive, they actually mean it. It’s really easy to get it live and use it.”
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- Lucy Kemish, Senior Global CRM Manager, Astrid & Miyu

Next, Astrid & Miyu set out to evaluate if text messages drive more purchases and incremental revenue. To test this, they randomly opted-out 1,000 SMS subscribers to see how campaigns and triggered journeys affected purchase behavior. In other words, if shoppers who were opted in to Attentive made more purchases than shoppers who were opted out, they could prove that SMS was driving incremental revenue. 

The results definitively showed the value of the channel: SMS subscribers spent 60% more than non-subscribers. And, similar tests determined that Attentive’s 2-in-1 sign-up units increased website conversion rates by 1.3% and collected 30% more emails than their previous email sign-up units. 

Building a data-driven personalization strategy

Once they achieved their first goal of proving the impact of SMS, Astrid & Miyu was ready to infuse more personalization into their SMS strategy. They use Attentive’s tag to collect intel on site behavior, like when someone views or adds a product to cart. This allows the brand to target subscribers based on their shopping intent to generate more purchases throughout the customer journey. 

For example, Astrid & Miyu adds subscribers to product-specific segments based on their browsing history. Then, they encourage subscribers who haven’t purchased yet to convert by sending them special offers for products in that category. 

Once a subscriber does make a purchase, Astrid & Miyu has an even better understanding of their preferences, which helps them personalize future communications. They set up a triggered post-purchase journey to keep recent shoppers engaged with recommendations for similar products.

“One of the biggest things we've enjoyed in Attentive is the data collection. As a business that doesn't have an in-house development team, we weren't able to implement data capture via our pop-ups as easily as we can now. This, alongside Attentive’s segmentation and message journey capabilities, has really boosted our overall data collection and ability to personalize how we reach subscribers across touchpoints.” 
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- Lucy Kemish, Senior Global CRM Manager, Astrid & Miyu

As part of their festive season campaign, Astrid & Miyu used Attentive’s Two-Way Journeys™ to ask subscribers about who they were shopping for via text message, prompting them to reply with a specific keyword. Each response triggered another message with a direct link to a collection.

The brand can save their subscribers' replies as custom attributes, which helps future-proof their strategy. They can use information their consumers volunteer directly (i.e., zero-party data) to build sophisticated segments and deliver individualized SMS experiences. 

SMS is also helping Astrid & Miyu strengthen their other channels and touchpoints, like their loyalty program and retail presence. The brand creates and sends SMS campaigns based on customer activity from LoyaltyLion, triggering messages when customers have points that are eligible for redemption. And, they send text messages to local subscribers notifying them about store events and same-day availability for piercing appointments to drive a higher volume of walk-ins. 

From zero to 33x ROI

Since launching their program with Attentive in June 2022, Astrid & Miyu has surpassed their early goal of driving 10x ROI from SMS—achieving 33x ROI. 

SMS has proven to be a highly effective channel for keeping customers engaged and coming back: 40% of SMS subscribers have made a purchase, and 20% have made two or more purchases.

“We're definitely seeing a higher repeat rate with SMS. Our email database has been built over the last 10 years, so we thought there would be a big discrepancy between its value and the value we would see with SMS. But, because our SMS subscribers are incredibly engaged, we saw immediate and consistent success from the channel. It’s a great tool for driving not only the first purchase, but also the second, and then hopefully third and fourth purchases. The facts are there already.”
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- Lucy Kemish, Senior Global CRM Manager, Astrid & Miyu

Astrid & Miyu also has big plans for the future of their SMS program. They want to use text messaging to facilitate more cross-channel customer journeys, like sending in-store appointment reminders and incentivizing loyalty members to refer their friends to earn points. 

“By digging deeper into the subscriber data we’re collecting with Attentive, we’re opening up a way to marry the online and offline experience for our customers.”
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- Lucy Kemish, Senior Global CRM Manager, Astrid & Miyu

The cherry on top for the Astrid & Miyu team is that Attentive has made their jobs as marketers more enjoyable. “SMS has made my job more interesting, and my team has really enjoyed using the platform as well. It’s enriched our day-to-day life because the UI is fun to use and we’re seeing results,” says Kemish.