How Urban Outfitters Drives Incremental Demand By Communicating With Customers Across Mobile Channels

Challenge

Urban Outfitters partnered with Attentive to launch its text message marketing channel and quickly grew subscribers using various list growth tools, including Attentive’s “Email-First” sign-up unit to seamlessly collect both email addresses and phone numbers. With incredible subscriber list growth came the need to optimize and segment their sends.

Solution

Urban Outfitters split its text messaging file into two groups. Inactive—users who are subscribed to SMS but not active on other UO marketing channels; and Active—users who are subscribed to SMS and also active in other UO marketing channels.

Strategy

Unexpectedly, the Active file drove higher engagement and demand. From those learnings, Urban Outfitters decided to create a second test, further segmenting its Active and Inactive segments by placing them into Test and Control groups. This would allow the brand to understand what kind of incremental demand text message marketing was driving. The Test group received a promotional text message, and the Control group did not receive a text message at all.

Results

The Active Test group saw a 13% increase in demand vs. the Control group. The incremental lift was especially significant for the segment of subscribers that were active in email, driving a 19% increase in demand. Through these tests, Urban Outfitters proved that sending a text message to subscribers who are active across other communication channels does drive an increase in incremental demand. It also proved that sending text messages to these audiences did not cannibalize email or mobile push notifications, but instead, worked in harmony.