Case Study

Vitacost

A Kroger-owned health retailer boosts customer engagement, loyalty, and lifetime value with a personalized kinetic email campaign

Industry
eCommerce
Geography
United States
Partner

Vitacost, part of the Kroger family of companies, is a leading health and wellness eCommerce retailer. The company is committed to contributing to customers’ healthy lifestyles through its website, mobile app, marketing channels, and inspirational blog.

Vitacost.com is known for offering great value and savings on the healthy products customers want, including vitamins, nutritional supplements, beauty supplies, and organic grocery products.

The Challenge

Behind Vitacost’s major success over the years lies a contentrich marketing approach with email as a major channel. The marketing team at Vitacost wanted to improve their exclusive “Mystery Sale” email offerings, which directed customers to special landing pages to claim coupon codes they could use to shop on the Vitacost.com site. But this extra step came at the risk of losing customer attention, so Vitacost enlisted Marigold Engage to:

Create a frictionless process of revealing discount codes
Vitacost wanted customers to view their deal in the simplest way possible, without needing to navigate to separate landing pages after reading about the offer.
Immediately attract customer attention right in the inbox
The team needed the right inbox technology to make uncovering “mystery sales” an exciting and rewarding experience.
Personalize messages depending on customers’ loyalty status
How could Vitacost draw on the latest consumer data to target specific segments with dynamic email content?

With Marigold Engage, we’re able to increase engagement and revenue per email, proving that relevancy and personalization work… We know that when we deliver surprising and delightful experiences to our customers in-email, customers will respond.

Danielle Van Acker

Email Marketing Manager, Vitacost

The Path To Success:
Customer experience

Working with Marigold Engage, Vitacost created a new high-impact and interactive “Mystery Sale” campaign that not only generated immediate returns on investment, but also ensured that every customer consistently enjoys a useful and relevant customer experience. Vitacost met their goal with this fourstep approach:

Reducing friction by leveraging kinetic email
Kinetic email is designed to give customers a visual and intuitive experience when opening them. Rather than clicking links that navigated to separate landing pages, the email team re-designed mystery deal emails with an added dynamic toggle function. Now, all customers have to do is click the “mystery box” to reveal the deal code within the email itself.
Using smart segmentation to reward loyalty
Every customer wants to be treated like a VIP. Marigold Engage leverages audience data and can automatically segment them according to their loyalty status. In this case, Vitacost sorts repeat customers into six loyalty levels: premium, valuable, potential, uncommitted, lapsing, and new. Each group now receives special mystery deals based on their status, allowing Vitacost to reward customers for passing important milestones with the brand.
Personalizing messages
Going further, each customer now also receives unique offers, promo codes, and individualized subject lines in emails depending on customer behavior or attributes.
Precise tracking and testing
Using Selligent’s content management tools makes it easy for Vitacost to increasingly refine and achieve successful messaging. The marketing team can extensively test each message to determine the optimal version for each target group – all in a single interface.

Results

Marigold Engage delivered on all fronts, enabling Vitacost to capitalize on the power of kinetic email and personalization.

Working with Marigold Engage has enabled our team to take our messaging to the next level. Our customers love getting and interacting with these ‘Mystery Sale’ emails – and the campaign has not only improved our metrics, but helped us retain customers because they’re getting messages that are most relevant to them,” said Danielle Van Acker, Email Marketing Manager at Vitacost.

53 %
Increased click to-open-rates
31% %
Increase in revenue per email (RPE)

What can you do with Marigold Engage?