Stio grows revenue 28x with emails powered by data

Based in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Stio is an outdoor apparel brand for men, women, and children with products that move effortlessly from hiking peaks to everyday wear. Founded to inspire connection with the outdoors through beautiful, functional clothing and gear infused with mountain soul, Stio has been operating since 2012. The Stio team takes pride in guiding customers to the right epic alpine pursuits or the quieter moments of mountain life.

Stio's customers choose to visit one of their retail locations or digital properties because they're passionate about the outdoors. Though it's safe to assume each customer would consider themselves adventurous, they probably have a very different perspective on what they consider an adventure. For retail brands like Stio, Optimizely's market-leading Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an excellent fit because they have a broad diversity of interest profiles within their audience and need a data-driven way to engage with each customer.

Gnarly Excel spreadsheets hide customer context

Before Optimizely, Stio struggled to personalize marketing campaigns to their target outdoor buyers. The brand primarily sent batch-and-blast email campaigns and had minimal insight into how customers engaged across channels and devices.

The Stio team could only gain insight into the customer lifecycle through a massive Excel report they received monthly from their data management agency. As a result, they couldn't see how a campaign affected product performance or lifecycle migration, for example. In addition, lack of integration across channels provided conflicting signals and was often too old for a reliable view of the customer experience.

The team at Stio wanted to move quickly and get to customers at the right time. Still, it was impossible to influence campaigns quickly enough or provide personalization through automation with inaccurate, complete, and unintegrated data.

At Stio, Mike Swanson, Lifecycle Marketing Manager, had a two-fold problem. First, he needed to solve Stio's sprawling data and unify everything into a single view of the customer. Then, Swanson needed a solution that would give him the power to act on his data in real-time. That's when he found Optimizely Data Platform (ODP), the customer data platform (CDP) that adds the customer context to Optimizely’s composable DXP. With a real-time understanding of their customers and business performance, with the ability to act on his data, Swanson and Stio had a solution to both problems in one with Data Platform.

"Data is not only available but also dynamic and actionable," says Swanson. "I can filter the lifecycle dashboard by different segments and apply product and category dimensions to understand affinities that I would never have been able to with other platforms."

Real-time lifecycle data and dynamic behavioral segmentation

Now, instead of mass marketing to all customers, Stio gives different offers and messages to different segments depending on their past buying behavior and where they are in their lifecycle. They're also able to profile shoppers with more lucrative offers progressively instead of giving the same offer or special to everyone; Stio shows the right offer to the shopper most likely to redeem it.

To one-time buyers and more personal touches like letters from the CEO and thank you campaigns to loyal customers. They test and optimize discounts based on behavioral data to ensure they're offering price reductions only when necessary, minimizing the impact on the bottom line.

Stio leverages lifecycle data and dynamic behavioral segmentation to run welcome, cart abandon, browse abandon, post-purchase, re-engagement, and win-back campaigns. In addition, Stio will segment customer profiles based on gender and different discount groups to deliver more targeted promotional campaigns and newsletters that convert at higher rates.

"There are endless filters I can apply to a segment to ensure I'm reaching the right audience," Swanson explains.

28x the revenue per email sent

Data Platform has helped the Stio team drastically improve lifecycle analysis and campaign attribution for email marketing. By looking at lifecycle data in new and critical ways, they can make smarter marketing decisions and optimize campaigns rapidly.

Stio has seen tremendous results from behavioral campaigns. Overall, the revenue per send of behavioral campaigns is 28 times that of promotional campaigns. Data Platform-powered behavioral campaigns make up just two percent of Stio's email volume, but they drive 42 percent of their overall email revenue. Additionally, Stio has seen a 118X return on investment using Data Platform through their new data-driven strategy.

Moving forward, Stio plans to use Data Platform to expand its churn prevention strategy to other channels, including web push, social, and search. In addition, they plan to synchronize their high lifetime value (LTV) customer segments with Facebook and Google for both acquisition and retention purposes and expect to see similarly impressive results across channels.

"The overall philosophy of Data Platform is fundamentally different than any solution I've used in the past," says Swanson. "Its focus on the customer lifecycle and increasing lifetime value across channels is a perfect complement to Stio's churn prevention strategy."