Press Release

Sailthru Decreases Acquisition Costs and Increases Revenue from New Customers for Rent the Runway, SheKnows Media and Betabrand

NEW YORK – August 10, 2016 – Marigold Engage by Sailthru, the leading Customer Retention Cloud sm for the world’s top retail and media companies, today announces it has decreased new customer acquisition costs for Facebook acquisition campaigns by up to 45 percent and increased expected lifetime value by more than 50 percent for brands including Rent the Runway, SheKnows Media and Betabrand.

Through omnichannel customer profiles and a data science-driven product suite, Marigold Engage by Sailthru enables marketers to connect retention data and acquisition programs to increase spend efficiencies and
improve outcomes. 

Key results from the program include:

• Forty percent reduction in mobile subscriber acquisition costs for Rent the Runway; 53 percent increase in expected lifetime value of new customer acquisitions.
• Forty-five percent reduction in subscriber acquisition cost for SheKnows media; 107 percent predicted increase in pageviews per user in the next 30 days.
• Twenty-one percent increase in projected revenue per customer for Betabrand

“Improving the quality of acquisition programs is traditionally very labor intensive. It can take months, if not years, to identify the most effective way to segment existing customers in order to build a model for new customer acquisition that delivers long-term value,” said Josh Gray, Director of Acquisition Marketing at Rent the Runway. “By working with Marigold Engage by Sailthru, we can automate insights development using vast troves of customer data to power new customer acquisition. With this program we’ve expanded our audience reach and the results have exceeded our top performing customers segment. We’ve now tripled our acquisition test spend.”

Sailthru’s technology is known by leading retailers and publishers for its advanced email marketing and cross-channel personalization capabilities. In addition to customer experience and campaign management tools, Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s Prediction Manager capability offers marketers 13 out-of-the-box predictions, including probability of making a purchase, predicted pageviews generated and probability of opt-outing out of email. Predictions are made for every customer on a daily basis and take into consideration the complete history of customer and reader behaviors across email, web, mobile, social and offline channels.

Publishers can automatically predict which of their readers will generate significant pageviews — a proxy for revenue per user — and then segment these readers to build lookalike audiences in Facebook using Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s one-click integration. Retailers predict which customers will purchase and how much they will spend to automate top customer segmentation and the acquisition of new, high value customers.

Sailthru’s capabilities solve three key challenges faced by modern marketers:

• Advancing segmentation: marketers traditionally use time and labor-intensive frameworks such as recency-frequency-monetary (“RFM”) modelling to identify top customers and other segments. With Marigold Engage by Sailthru, traditional segmentation and segmentation based on multiple predicted behaviors is achieved through a simple interface.
• Improving reach: Sailthru’s predictions are proven to be more accurate than historical data-based modeling and to improve reach by identifying potential customers that traditional models miss. Overlap between Sailthru’s predictions-based targeting and traditional segmentation-based targeting can be as little as 15 percent, allowing marketers significantly greater reach.
• Long-term value generation: conventional acquisition programs are evaluated based on the ability to drive short-term conversions and revenue without considering repeat purchases, site visits, propensity to churn and other retention-based metrics. With Marigold Engage by Sailthru, marketers can protect their acquisition investments by evaluating programs based on long-term, predicted value including one-year lifetime value.

“For too long, marketers have been focused on the short-term value of new customer wins. While these metrics are important, brands aren’t recognizing the true context of customer lifetime value,” said Neil Lustig, CEO of Sailthru. “By working with Facebook, we can empower marketers to leverage their downstream data to optimize new customer acquisitions and bring in patrons with longer term engagements and customer lifetime value. It’s time for marketing teams to integrate their retention and acquisition efforts as the results from Rent the Runway, SheKnows Media and Betabrand prove that both can be improved when connected.”