In the 1980s, Kerri Kent, an avid windsurfer and horseback rider, wanted to find a swimsuit that would fit her athletic lifestyle. Coming up short, she began using performance fabrics to make high quality, well-fitting, and flattering swimsuits that fit her needs.
Not long after Kerri started designing her popular swimsuits, she was approached by the CEO of an equestrian apparel company to design a line of riding breeches that were affordable, flattering, and functional. Kerrits was born.
Since its inception, Kerrits has grown immensely and now makes riding breeches, tights, tops, jackets, and accessories for women and children. Recently, the brand launched EQL, a line of riding-inspired everyday clothing.
Initially, Kerrits operated as a fully wholesale company, but in the past three years, Kerrits made the move to selling direct-to-consumer. This change created the need for a more attentive and involved email marketing program.
When Sara Florin, Senior Director of Branding & Marketing at Kerrits, joined the company, email was handled by a team at a parent company. Sara saw the potential and wanted to send more messages, but felt she needed to be at the helm to maximize the success of the email program.
The leadership team encouraged Sara to find an email service provider (ESP) that could handle the email marketing needs of the growing business, the exploding success of its new DTC model, and the high consumer demands of the EQL line of casual wear.
“Kerrits’ parent company was managing email marketing on their own and it simply couldn’t keep up with Kerrits’ growth. There was a huge need for us to invest in a smart email service provider.”
—Sara Florin
The right tools for a quickly scaling ecommerce business
The main challenge Kerrits experienced was finding an email provider that would not only yield excellent results but also be able to handle the demands of a quickly scaling business, still managed by an extremely small marketing team.
More specifically, Kerrits needed an ESP that was intuitive and provided the right features for a booming ecommerce company, including robust automation functionality, stellar segmentation capabilities, and solid reporting.
The Kerrits and EQL brands are distinctive, so it was important to Florin to find a platform with a beautiful interface and easy email design features that allowed for an elegant and unique design—without the need for coding.
Another challenge Kerrits faced before finding Omnisend was a lack of email analytics, reporting, and testing capabilities. Previously, the marketing team was sending some welcome, post-purchase, shipping confirmation, and refund confirmation messages directly from Shopify.
However, due to the lack of reporting and A/B testing features in Shopify, there was no way for the team to test emails or even the progress and performance of their messages.
An easy-to-use ESP with comprehensive features
Florin conducted in-depth research and looked at several email providers, including MailChimp, Constant Contact, Klaviyo, and Omnisend.
While other ESPs provided some functionality, Omnisend offered all the features and power Florin needed to meet the demands of two growing brands.
The beautiful Omnisend interface is what first caught Florin’s attention. Coming from a creative background, and knowing little about coding, Florin loved the good-looking, easy-to-navigate interface. She was also drawn in by the simple creative options for designing branded emails without having to touch a line of code.
While the marketing team was pleased with Omnisend’s clean interface and straightforward design elements, they were also impressed with its robust features, including:
- Automation. Kerrits quickly set up automated promotional, product abandonment, cart abandonment, welcome, post-purchase, seasonal best-sellers, and re-engagement messages, eliminating the need for the internal team to manually send out messages.
- Reporting. The marketing team switched from sending welcome and post-purchase messages from Shopify to Omnisend. Now, they can see all relevant metrics and generate reports.
- Segmentation. With two brands, Kerrits and EQL, Kerrits created segments for Kerrits’ customers, EQL customers, and customers of both brands. With this segmentation, Kerrits can send the right messages to the right customers at the right time.
- A/B testing. Kerrits started A/B testing promotional emails and found its free shipping email was capturing the most conversions.
- Workflow splits. Kerrits loves being able to use the split functionality inside of workflows to send the appropriate, well-designed, and accurately branded content to the right customers.
Improved email performance and a significant increase in email revenue
Omnisend has been the tool Kerrits needed to meet the email marketing needs of its booming equestrian clothing line and its casual apparel brand. Not only has Florin been able to design, segment, and automate messages for its various customers, but Kerrits has also seen across-the-board improvements in their metrics.
Here are some of the most notable results since switching to Omnisend:
- Increased revenue-per-email by 50%. In the four months after making the switch, Kerrits achieved a significant increase in revenue-per-email (RPE) of its promotional campaigns. Kerrits standard promotional emails generate a 26% open rate, a 19% click-to-open rate, and a 5.6% conversion rate, while their automated emails generate an average open rate of 44%, click-to-open rate of 23%, and conversion rate of 21.7%.
- Increased sales, not their workload, with automated messaging.
- Kerrits’ welcome message sees an RPE of $6.58, a nearly 1600% lift over promotional messages, and is responsible for 28% of their automated email revenue.
- Abandon cart messages see an RPE of $6.64, a 1600% lift over promotional messages, and are responsible for 29% of their automated email revenue. Abandon cart SMS generate a 15% conversion rate and an earning-per-message of $2.87.
- Product abandonment messages see an RPE of $2.86, a 630% lift over promotional messages, and are responsible for 14% of automated email revenue.
- Compared to promotional messages, automated messages see a 676% lift in revenue-per-email.
- Boosts in revenue from unique seasonal campaigns. Florin used automation to her advantage and set up seasonal promotional campaigns. These product abandonment emails featuring their best-selling products generated 42 new orders in August, representing nearly $6,000 in sales.
“Our emails that were previously managed internally were performing so well, and I didn’t want to see a drop in performance when I adopted a new ESP. That didn’t happen—our click rates stayed the same, and we increased revenue-per-email by 50% compared to our previous ESP.”—Sara
Sara and the rest of the team couldn’t be happier with how Kerrits and EQL have grown since moving to Omnisend. Even with a small team, they’ve been able to use the tools Omnisend provides to rapidly increase sales and are looking forward to growing sales even further in the coming year.
