How Cynthia Rowley Uses Conversational Commerce to Reach Shoppers & Boost Sales

Challenge

Cynthia Rowley’s e-commerce business has grown exponentially over the last few years. With over 70% of website traffic coming from mobile devices, the brand wanted to engage its high-value mobile shoppers while providing a positive impact on overall conversion rates.

Solution

Partner with Attentive to rapidly scale a text messaging program and grow text messaging sign-ups. Reach shoppers in an immediate and direct way where they spend the most time on their phones: text messaging.

Getting started with Attentive was easy—it took maybe a week or two. We started with a mobile pop-up to collect sign-ups and acquired a lot of phone numbers that way. We then expanded to abandoned cart reminders and other types of messaging.
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– Emily Andrews, Vice President of E-Commerce, Cynthia Rowley

Strategy

Cynthia Rowley drives text messaging opt-ins on its mobile website using Attentive’s “two-tap” sign-up creatives, which the Attentive team helps design. After a subscriber joins, they receive an automated series of “welcome” messages introducing them to the brand.

We wanted to find ways to continue to inspire our customers with vibrant content, while also communicating with them in their preferred ways and not adding to their inbox anxiety.
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– Allie Egan, President & CEO, Cynthia Rowley

Cynthia Rowley uses its text message marketing channel in a variety of ways, such as alerting subscribers of new arrivals & best-sellers, an adventure-inspired “as seen on social” series, invitations to location-specific events, and limited-time promotions.

For New York Fashion Week, the brand sent a text message to subscribers promoting a giveaway of 2 tickets to attend the Cynthia Rowley runway show, where the winner would be among the first to see the new Fall/Winter collection. Through this brand marketing campaign delivered through text messaging, Cynthia Rowley was able to drive high engagement without offering a discount.

Cynthia Rowley also sends text messages in tandem with marketing emails. “We will send the text out first and the email after; sometimes we’ll send the text after the email as a quick reminder. We found that these two channels both work really well together,” said Andrews.

Results

Over the past 6 months, Cynthia Rowley has grown text messaging subscribers by 268%. As early adopters of this new channel, Cynthia Rowley has gained an advantage over other e-commerce brands and is able to send relevant, timely text messages to subscribers on a 1:1 basis.

While there are many ways to reach our customers—through social, email, and advertising—texting just made sense to us because it’s how people communicate these days, and it’s much more immediate. It’s also a less saturated channel, so if people aren’t responsive elsewhere, you can always reach them directly through text messaging.
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– Emily Andrews, Vice President of E-Commerce, Cynthia Rowley

Cynthia Rowley has also implemented a cart abandonment campaign that sends a text message reminder to subscribers 60 minutes after they abandon their online shopping cart. This automated message has resulted in 24%+ conversion rates, helping recover sales that otherwise might be lost. Overall, the brand has seen 33x ROI since implementing their personalized mobile messaging channel.

As for future plans to scale this program, Cynthia Rowley intends on implementing Attentive’s “Email-First” creatives—which will allow the brand to capture both mobile phone numbers and email addresses. Cynthia Rowley is also interested in creating dedicated landing pages to drive text messaging sign-ups from social media.

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