In this episode I meet Helen Nightingale, Vice President of Ecommerce at Draper James. If you haven’t heard of Draper James, it’s a six plus year old online retailer that is actor Reese Witherspoon retail concept with both stores and a thriving online business. Helen shares insights around the foundations of the business, and how they are using SMS texting to drive results.
Welcome to the The Voice of Retail , I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, and this podcast is brought to you in conjunction with Retail Council of Canada
In this episode I meet Helen Nightingale, Vice President of Ecommerce at Draper James. If you haven’t heard of Draper James, it’s a six plus year old online retailer that is actor Reese Witherspoon retail concept with both stores and a thriving online business. Helen shares insights around the foundations of the business, and how they are using SMS texting to drive results.
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Today’s podcast is part of an ongoing series of CommerceNext episodes that will feature some the fantastic speakers taking the virtual stage January 27th and February 3rd with snapshot insights into how they dealt with online /eCommerce in the first year of the COVID era and lessons learned for the future.
You can learn more and register for CommerceNext here.
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I’m your host Michael LeBlanc, President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company, and if you’re looking for more content, or want to chat follow me on LinkedIn, or visit my website meleblanc.co!
Until next time, stay safe and have a great week!
Michael LeBlanc
Helen welcome to The Voice of Retail podcast. How are you doing today?
Helen Nightingale
I'm so good. Happy to be connecting with you.
Michael LeBlanc
Well, thanks for joining me. I'm excited to hear your background and learn more about Draper James and we're connecting here because you're going to be on the virtual stage of Commerce Next. So let's just jump right in. Tell me a bit about yourself, and who are you? What do you do? And what's your background? And about Draper James?
Helen Nightingale
Yes, I've been with Draper James for about three and a half years. And my background originally is in marketing analytics. So, kind of joined the team with the intent of focusing on building out some of the analytics functions and capabilities at Draper James. My role has kind of very much expanded in the past bunch of years, which has been exciting as the company has grown. So, I now kind of oversee certainly still analytics but site merchandising, site operations, and then yes, digital marketing and some of our retention, marketing and loyalty efforts as well. Prior to Draper James, I was actually with Nordstrom at their headquarters in Seattle, working on kind of marketing and analytics and finance type things so kind of took the big company best practices and scaled them down. Draper James is Reese Witherspoon's lifestyle brand. We're primarily DTC, a digitally native but do you have a handful of brick and mortar stores as well?
Michael LeBlanc
I've done a lot of work in my past with celebrity brands and celebrities, because I was with, called The Shopping Channel, it’s like QVC, or Canada. And my experience has been that celebrity brands have a spectrums. At one end of the spectrum, it's really just a name attached to a brand, and there's not much engagement. At the other end of the spectrum, it's full engagement, there's a vision, there's been a lot of involvement. Where it looks to me like Reese sits on the farther end of the spectrum, getting engaged. But how would you describe her role? Or how Draper James goes to market? And a bit about the assortment you carry, what's the vision behind the site?
Helen Nightingale
Yeah, I think that her original kind of vision behind starting the brand is really still something that's very core and fundamental to what we're doing and what we're trying to accomplish. So, you know, about six years ago, at this point, seven years ago, she kind of was thinking about fashion, obviously, in her in her life, she experiences tons of different fashion viewpoints, but was realizing that kind of things, were either starting in LA and starting to New York, and then spread into the rest of the country. And she really felt like there was an opportunity to bring to market a brand that started with kind of a southern point of view, and then translated that to a more national scale. So, that was kind of the vision and guess still, I think is a pretty good fit for some of what we're trying to accomplish. She, yes, I mean, is very involved in terms of design and kind of concepts and inspiration. And then certainly yes, in our marketing efforts, as well. So, it's been great to work with her.
Michael LeBlanc
It's fun to watch the site, because she kind of appears every now and then as a model. Like it's a very, it's a very fun way and named after her grandparents. I think is that is that?
Helen Nightingale
Yeah, good memory, yes. Exactly. So, definitely has the authentic heritage viewpoint there.
Michael LeBlanc
Well, that's great. Such a great actor.
All right, well, let's talk about this two starts in one stop idea. So, we've, you've got a depth of experience in e commerce and retail. And we've all had lots of new experiences in the COVID era, and we expect to have more. Give me your idea of two things that the listeners should start doing or you started doing. And then one thing that maybe they might consider stopping doing?
Helen Nightingale
Sure. So, we have definitely been leaning into SMS really heavily and certainly in the past year in particular, but really kind of past two plus years as an important channel for us. And yes, this is a little bit of a plug and tie into some of the things I'm talking to the Conference Next folks about during this event. But you know, we have seen that really be our fastest growing channel. I think the engagement and attention that you're getting within that platform right now is, you know, really kind of unmatched. So, we've seen really fantastic response to that. But I think that kind of what we all kind of need to do now is take that to the next level. I mean, I think that yes, it's pretty easy and low lift to just kind of send out these batch and blast, you know, promotional messages via SMS. But we've started to see a lot of success with focusing on segmentation. Segmentation is also a great way to manage your costs, quite frankly, as our list has been really growing our list is kind of more than tripled in the past year. And so, you know, I think we think about that and we think about ability to segment kind of on all sorts of things based on past purchase behavior. Based on even keyword responses, as people are kind of responding to that the text that you're sending if you're sending them in a conversational way. So I think that's going to be something we'll continue to really lean into this year. And then kind of tied to that, in our COVID life, obviously, we have a little bit more challenges with our brick and mortar stores than we kind of maybe anticipated. So, we've had to really re-imagine what omni channel means for us right now. And kind of how we can use our stores as effective tools and actually ties into SMS as well.
We, we've launched, I should say, we've tackled the omni channel question and really several ways in the past year kind of further leaned into using store inventory to fulfill online orders. And one of the things that's been an interesting surprise, that is, you know, we do sometimes have aged inventory, at the stores that you know, will appear when stores are having tent sales or things like that. But by making that inventory available online, we actually were able to move through it pretty effectively as customers kind of stumble across things that they hadn't seen in a while or like felt fresh to them. So that yeah, it has been ended up being fulfilling from stores has ended up being a really significant portion of the business, more so than we would have anticipated in the past year.
Michael LeBlanc
Let me ask a couple of quick follow up questions on that. So, when you say your SMS lists tripled, there's obviously people are home more, but is that a campaign? Like how did you triple that? Some of it might have been, in other words, organic, but it, my sense is you would, you would have had to do something to get those gains. Any advice around that for the retailers listening?
Helen Nightingale
Yes, I think there are some good teaser opportunities that can be leveraged. I do have to say most of ours is just kind of the organic growth of people coming to the site and kind of seeing the typical opt in prompt. But at the same time, there's also some really fun campaigns that you can run around encouraging people via like an Instagram Stories swipe up to enroll in SMS, and then get kind of first access to something. So that you know, this is something we've done where, you know, we'll say we have a new for example, like a new collection or a new like collaboration coming tomorrow night, but if you want to, like get early access to it, and kind of be the first to know you can swipe up to learn about it here. And then, you know, kind of fills you in through all the legal prompts and enrollment process for SMS.
Michael LeBlanc
So, is it your feeling or experience that the SMS drives a more urgency, more call to action? Because it's just it's a different medium than an email or other things is it? I see it sounds like you're connecting all parts like social media into SMS almost it's both relationship and direct response in some ways for you.
Helen Nightingale
Yes, definitely. And I think that the fact that we know that, obviously, there's a lot of similarities in terms of like a mobile first customer who's engaging with us on organic social certainly is also going to be the kind of customer who's on their phone and maybe more receptive to receiving marketing directly on their phone as well.
Michael LeBlanc
Right, I guess it gets like a bit of a hands up if you're going to sign up for SMS, you're obviously engaged in that channel, right? So
Helen Nightingale
Yeah, love that hand raiser bias for sure, yeah. But I mean, I know that there's kind of benchmarks around this but it's a little hard to gauge just because of the technology exact open rate of SMS. But um, you know, we believe that it's north of 80%, which you know, obviously anyone would dream of having an email like massive email campaign rate nearly that high so
Michael LeBlanc
And very high and pretty dependable delivery rates too, right? I mean, there's, you know, an email of course you don't always know your what's your delivery rate actual delivered in the box rate is, so it that's another advantage for sure of SMS. Yeah,
Helen Nightingale
Yeah, exactly. Although I have to be honest, we have pretty good delivery rates on email too, thankfully.
Michael LeBlanc
Tick both boxes. Wonderful fact. All right, what's next?
Helen Nightingale
Pivoting kind of to this omni channel component, sorry for kind of leaping ahead there. So, as I mentioned, omni channel fulfillment has gotten to be a really big part of the business. But so, you know, that's kind of almost our store staff there is filling the role of fulfillment associates, right. They're kind of writing these lovely handwritten notes and packaging things up and sending them all across the country. So that's been an interesting way that we can leverage them but I think a more fun and kind of customer facing way has been through some of these direct communication opportunities and actually through SMS as well. So, we piloted this program and around the holiday season, through kind of our integrations with Attentive and then Zendesk as well as kind of like a customer care ticket system. Where we created these custom flows within Attentive, where if you texted the key word, “DJELF” as in, like Draper James gifting elf, to our short code, you were basically kicked into this flow where we, basically got some information about who you were shopping for Christmas or holiday gifts. And you know, what their interests were, kind of what your price range was. And then from there, you'd be connected via SMS directly with an associate in our store who could kind of say, “I put together this curated gift set for you”, or text you pictures, or answer your questions, things like that. And again, in times when foot traffic, due to pandemic reasons might be kind of extra challenging in brick and mortar, it's a great way for the store associates to still kind of get this direct connection with the customer.
Michael LeBlanc
Fantastic. All right, two great things, two great buckets of advice, so to speak. What about the one stop? What do you think there?
Helen Nightingale
So, I'm feeling concerned heading into 2021, about reliance on paid social and Instagram and Facebook kind of in particular. So, a goal that we're setting for ourselves to kind of stop our reliance as like, you know, obviously, it's fantastic that that's connected us with so many customers. But we want to make sure that we're reaching customers and kind of other ways and new ways as we look to diversify this year.
Michael LeBlanc
Yeah, that's a good one. So, you're on the Conference Next virtual stage coming up, what are you going to be talking about?
Helen Nightingale
I'm going to be talking about SMS, my favorite fastest growing channel and
Michael LeBlanc
And lots more to say about it, lots more to say
Helen Nightingale
More details about some of the segmentation strategies we've been able to leverage to improve engagement and conversion in that channel.
Michael LeBlanc
Oh, fantastic. Well, listen, it was great to get to know the brand. I was surprised when you said it was a, you'd been there and a half years. And it was a six year old brand. It was kind of new to me, actually. Of course I'm in Toronto, Canada. So maybe it's a bit off the radar screen. But it's great to learn about you and great introduction to Draper James. So, thank you so much for joining me on The Voice of Retail. And I'll be, I'll be watching looking forward to hearing the rest of the story on SMS coming up, coming up soon.
Helen Nightingale
Thank you. Yes, I appreciate it. And don't worry, we are working on improving our international shipping opportunities. So, you'll be able to get some Draper James in Toronto before you know I'm sure.
Michael LeBlanc
All the way, that's coming Far North. There you go. Fantastic.
Helen Nightingale
Exactly. Exactl.y
Michael LeBlanc
All right. Helen, thanks for joining me.
Helen Nightingale
Thanks, so nice to meet you