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Driving Radical ROI with Iterable AI Joybird was recognized at the 2025 Iterable Expie Awards as the winner of Best AI-Powered Customer Experience. This award honors Joybird’s commitment to using Iterable’s AI Suite thoughtfully and strategically to deliver high-performance, personalized journeys that drive significant revenue and engagement. |
For Joybird, a modern furniture brand and subsidiary of La-Z-Boy Incorporated known for customizable designs and a digital-first customer experience, growth has always depended on understanding its customers deeply and meeting them at exactly the right moment.
But as the brand scaled, so did the complexity of its marketing. Disconnected channels, manual processes, and limited visibility into performance made it harder to deliver the kind of personalized, high-impact experiences Joybird is known for.
That’s where AI came in.
Overseeing Joybird’s customer engagement strategies, Yvette Rojas, Email Marketing Manager at Joybird, combines strategic planning and data analytics to support the company’s core business goals: maintaining profitability, acquiring new subscribers, and retaining existing customers, with a strong focus on lead generation. As the brand scaled, her team needed more advanced tools to execute on those goals efficiently.
By adopting Iterable’s AI-powered capabilities, Joybird transformed how it engages customers—bringing together data, automation, and experimentation to drive measurable gains in engagement and revenue. The results earned them recognition at the 2025 Iterable Expie Awards, where they took home Best AI-Powered Customer Experience.
From Fragmented Insights to a Unified Strategy
Before switching to Iterable, Joybird faced several challenges that hindered its marketing performance. The team struggled with disconnected data streams across their email and SMS marketing channels, resulting in an incomplete view of customer engagement and limiting their ability to create cohesive campaigns.
The marketing team recognized the need to move away from manual segmentation to improve efficiency. They needed more than incremental improvements—they needed a unified platform that could offer an omnichannel AI-powered solution, provide a clearer picture of performance metrics, and enable them to scale their marketing efforts efficiently.
“Since consolidating SMS and email using Iterable, we can confidently see what’s working and what’s not, and establish the right balance of SMS versus email messaging cadence for each user. Iterable SMS, paired with Looker insights, gives us specific clarity on SMS revenue attribution.”
~ Yvette Rojas, Email Marketing Manager at Joybird
Through this integration, Joybird has transformed fragmented insights into a well-rounded understanding of customer behavior, improving how they measure and refine their marketing efforts.
Maximizing Campaign Performance with Iterable AI
Joybird has harnessed the power of Iterable’s AI Suite, to strengthen campaign performance, particularly during high-stakes promotional periods. Key features, such as Send Time Optimization (STO), Brand Affinity, and Next Best Action, have enabled Joybird to enhance audience targeting and optimize campaign timing.
“My team tested Iterable’s AI tools during our tentpole sales campaigns and achieved significant lifts in engagement and revenue versus the control. Testing Send Time Optimization, Brand Affinity, and Next Best Action gave us statistically significant results within the test that helped us better engage loyal customers and re-engage inactive users.”
~ Laura Wusthoff, Director of Performance Media at Joybird
Rather than adopting AI all at once, Joybird took a measured, strategic approach: A/B testing to compare their manual outreach methods with AI-powered segmentation and scheduling. These tools not only improved efforts to effectively engage loyal customers but also helped re-engage inactive users, delivering noticeable improvements in conversion rates.
By benchmarking AI-driven decisions against manual processes, the team quickly pinpointed where automation would have the greatest impact and the potential to scale. The test results demonstrate an incremental lift in Click-to-Open Rate (CTOR), conversions, and revenue per delivery, showing clear, measurable gains from AI-led optimization.
“We applied Iterable’s AI tools to our tentpole sales campaigns and achieved significant lifts in engagement and revenue. Testing multiple iterations of STO, Brand Affinity, and Next Best Action provided statistically significant and encouraging results.”
~ Yvette Rojas, Email Marketing Manager at Joybird
How Joybird Put Iterable AI Into Practice
To operationalize these insights, Joybird applied Iterable’s AI capabilities across several key areas of its marketing strategy—testing each feature rigorously to understand its impact and identify where it could drive the most value.
1. Timing Messages Intelligently with Send Time Optimization (STO)
Send Time Optimization (STO) is an Iterable AI feature that helps you send notifications when your contacts are most likely to engage. For each campaign recipient, STO analyzes historical engagement behavior and selects an optimal, per-person send time.
| The Application | The Result |
| Joybird tested STO against static send times across various email campaigns throughout the year. They compared year-over-year data for similar campaigns to evaluate the impact of STO on performance. | A significantly higher conversion rate was achieved using Send Time Optimization (STO). |
2. Prioritizing High-Intent Audiences with Brand Affinity
Brand Affinity is an intelligent personalization solution powered by Iterable AI that gives marketers the power to transform customer engagement into more meaningful cross-channel experiences. It takes a holistic look at engagement across all channels and calculates a score that indicates how likely each contact will interact with future marketing messages. Based on their engagement, each contact is labeled (such as “loyal,” “positive,” “neutral,” or “negative”).
| The Application | The Result |
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Joybird tested Brand Affinity during significant tentpole sales (such as Cyber Monday and Black Friday), focusing on first and last sends, which are known to yield high traction. Their strategy involved:
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Brand Affinity has led to a significant increase in CTOR, becoming an essential part of the strategy at Joybird and eliminating the need for further A/B testing, according to Yvette. |
3. Re-Engaging Customers with Next Best Action
Next Best Action is an AI-driven feature that helps identify and re-engage previously engaged customers by helping to craft and automatically send the next best version of a previously completed campaign. It determines the optimal action to take with them at any given point in their journey by analyzing customer behavior and predicting the most effective way to drive engagement or conversion.
| The Application | The Result |
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Joybird tested Next Best Action by sending campaigns on off-time days, specifically the day after a scheduled promo, to remind customers of sales. This approach targeted customers who hadn’t opened campaigns recently. They compared a manual list of customers who hadn’t opened the last nine campaigns with the AI-generated Next Best Action list. |
The strategy led to increased revenue per delivery, essentially acting as a “second grab of cash” on days outside the main promotional calendar. |
4. Eliminating Guesswork with Channel Optimization
Channel Optimization analyzes a user’s historical data and sends messages to the channel they’re most likely to engage with. This eliminates the guesswork of which channel to use. The data is analyzed weekly to account for changes in channel preference. Channel Optimization ensures that users are alerted to time-sensitive messages on the channel where they have the highest probability of seeing them.
| The Application | The Result |
| Joybird utilizes channel optimization for dual subscribers (those subscribed to both email and SMS) to determine the preferred channel for engagement. They have integrated it into re-engagement, sunset, and win-back journeys. | Re-engagement flows saw a slight boost in both Click Rate and CTOR. |
By transitioning to a more data-informed approach through Iterable’s AI capabilities, Joybird has introduced efficiencies and unlocked new opportunities to better connect with its audience.
The Future with Iterable AI
Joybird is excited about exploring more AI features, particularly Smart Segmentation, which helps marketers easily build more precise audience segments with intuitive, real-time contextual insights for each segmentation decision and intelligent guardrails to prevent common data errors.
“I’m a big believer in the power of AI and am keen to try out Iterable’s latest innovations,” said Yvette.
This commitment to innovation ensures Joybird continues to lead with creativity while deepening the connection between its brand and its audience.
