When Lovepop blossomed from a greeting-card maker sharing the intricate paper artistry of Japanese kirigami into an omnichannel design powerhouse, it needed more than a garden-variety email platform to carry out its mission: to create “1 billion magical moments.” 

Founded in 2015 by best friends Wombi Rose and John Wise, Lovepop introduced the duo’s own creation: Slicegami™️, a pop-up paper design that marries kirigami’s cutting and folding with the mathematical precision of sliceform structure used in ship design. 

To achieve its “North Star” goal of driving profitable growth while improving customer happiness, Lovepop calls on a marketing stack whose elements work together as smoothly as the pieces in their intricate designs.

Harnessing the Power of Individualization

Lovepop connects with customers in both traditional direct mail—a 20-page seasonal catalog sent five times a year—and a powerful combination of social and email marketing. This helps Lovepop reach a wider audience, beyond its greeting-card enthusiasts. 

“Email has been part of the Lovepop strategy since Day One,” Ally Chapman, Lovepop’s Retention Marketing Manager, says. “It’s definitely our biggest channel for driving repeat purchases and getting customers back to the website.”

As part of its “customer happiness” goal, Lovepop relies on segmentation and 1:1 real time personalization to send meaningful messages, especially as it expands its product lines and designs to appeal to new customer segments.

Using an integration with tech partner Lytics in the Iterable platform, Lovepop adds dynamic content modules populated with individualized product recommendations to broadcast campaigns introducing seasonal designs and product lines. 

“The segmentation tool is fantastic,” Ally says. “On some platforms it can be hard to get segmented customer lists, but it’s so easy in Iterable and saves us at least 2 hours per week. For example, we can pull customers identified by our integration with Tealium AudienceStream, our customer data platform (CDP), who have ordered specific product types or who bought from a collection in the last six months.”

“With Tealium’s AudienceStream providing a unified view of the customer, we have been able to launch campaigns that are complementary to those running in Iterable across all other marketing channels. We also have developed a journey in Iterable that runs through our list segmentations daily and updates our Custom Audiences automatically.”

A Bit of Love in Every Message With Brand Affinity

The marketing team segments its audience based on everything from acquisition source to product interests. By layering Iterable’s Brand Affinity™ onto their segmentation strategy, the Lovepop team can tailor messaging even further based on customer sentiment (loyal, neutral, negative, etc.). Lovepop loyalists are communicated with differently than first-time subscribers. 

For example, Lovepop can suppress customers with negative brand affinity from certain campaigns, which reduces unsubscribes and helps maintain high click rates and revenue capture. 

“With Iterable, we can give customers with higher Brand Affinity more options for cadence and content while not entirely ignoring customers with lower Brand Affinity,” Ally says. “This enables us to continue giving lower-affinity customers a chance to re-engage with our brand without going overboard on send volume and creating a negative customer experience. “

Closing the Gap With Shopify

Lovepop has also solved another perennial problem: triggering cart abandonment campaigns for shoppers who have not yet been identified (i.e. shoppers who are not logged into an account or have not yet entered their email at checkout).

“We are built on top of Shopify for checkout,” Ally said. “Our order confirmations go out through Iterable, but the information comes from Shopify. Historically, we could send cart-abandonment emails only to customers who had logged in via Shopify.” 

Working with Tealium, Lovepop can capture the first-party data in the customer data profiles. This helps identify more abandoners’ e-mail addresses by tracking across multiple browser sessions and devices, allowing Iterable to trigger more abandonment emails. Sending more abandoned-cart reminders results in higher conversion rates.

“Closing that gap was very impactful,” Ally says. 

Enabling Data as the Thermostat in an “Always Be Testing” Framework

Another game-changer for the Lovepop team has been being able to ramp up its testing program. 

“Everyone should always be testing,” Ally says. “For us, subject line testing has been the most valuable, because finding the right one can really move the needle on performance. “

Lovepop was able to solve a major weakness of subject line testing: capturing the improved engagement and monetization in real time instead of waiting for the next similar campaign to deploy the “winning strategy.”  

Using Iterable’s Experiments tool, Lovepop can test several subject lines on small segments of a broadcast audience for two hours after deployment. At the two-hour mark, the winning subject line automatically goes out to the remaining 70% of the audience.

“We have been able to get a 20%+ lift in our click-through rate each time with the right subject line,” Ally says. “This allows us to maximize the revenue we can earn from our broadcast campaigns.”

Everything Leads Back to Customer Happiness

Maintaining a performance-driven, data-driven marketing program allows Lovepop to continually optimize. “Iterable’s key features have enabled us to maximize revenue from our customer base,” Ally says. “At the end of the day, revenue is a proxy for our mission of creating one billion magical moments—every additional order we drive from improved email performance represents another happy customer who helps bring more Lovepops into the world.”