A fresh approach: Jean&Len’s multi-layered segmentation strategy boosts open rates by 185%

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Jean&Len is a breath of fresh air in the world of personal care products. The German brand offers fragrant, high-performing cosmetics that are made from quality vegan ingredients with no unnecessary fillers. Stylish packaging sets it apart from other “eco” brands that tend to look functional and a bit boring. Although Jean&Len is best known for soaps and skincare, its expansion into homewares and jewellery means it is fast becoming a lifestyle brand.

Learn how engagement tiers and tagging improved the customer experience and increased email conversions

Challenge

Jean&Len was routinely sending newsletters and promotional emails to its entire subscriber list and unsurprisingly, engagement had begun to plummet. Even more worrying, the brand was starting to see the unsubscribe rate increasing. The problem was compounded when the company launched new lifestyle ranges – more products led to more email campaigns going out. The team at Jean&Len recognised that it was time to take a more targeted approach in order to improve customer engagement and reduce list churn. 

We had a lot of unsubscribers because people were receiving a lot of content about many different products, sometimes twice a week. And not everyone is interested in every product category. We just didn’t have the right segmentation in place.

Solution

With Klaviyo as a partner, Jean&Len has been able to use shoppers’ browsing behaviour to determine what they’re interested in, and then send them content and product suggestions they’ll love. 

Tags placed behind the images, CTAs, and links on the brand’s Shopware store mean that when a shopper clicks on a particular product or browses a category, data is pushed to Klaviyo. The tags enrich subscriber profiles and allow Jean&Len to segment the audience in any number of ways: it can select everybody who is interested in personal care products, in hand soap, or in a particular fragrance of hand soap.

Strategy

To avoid annoying people with too many emails, Jean&Len has adjusted the volume of marketing messages subscribers receive based on their level of engagement with the brand. It has segmented the subscriber list into three tiers – gold, silver, and bronze – that are based on recency and frequency of activity. 

Gold tier customers who buy from the brand regularly and have high email engagement are sent two campaigns per week; they’re the first to hear about new products and special offers. On the other hand, non-purchasers in the bronze tier receive a maximum of two emails a month. 

We know bronze subscribers are interested but they haven’t purchased anything yet, so we don’t want to scare them away.

Jean& Len combines the engagement tiers with interest-based tags to create segments with a high purchase intent, making email campaigns far more targeted than before. Since implementing a segmentation strategy 18 months ago, the average email open rate has increased by 185% and now stands at 46.5%.

With greater email engagement and fewer unsubscribes, we’re seeing strong net growth in our subscriber list, and that’s definitely due to the segmentation that we’re doing now in Klaviyo.

The brand is especially careful not to overload new subscribers with emails, as this can lead to people unsubscribing straight away. New contacts are excluded from newsletters and promotions until they have been through Jean&Len’s welcome series. This nurture flow offers an introductory discount, explains the brand values, and highlights the best selling products. It converts at 17.8%, which is about 10x the average for the industry. It’s also the brand’s best-performing automation and contributes around a third of the revenue attributed to email.