How Vineyard Vines Uses Analytics to Win Over Customers
In July 2016, the eCommerce team at Vineyard Vines set out to find a solution to help them keep pace with their dynamic customer base and stay true to their principles of authentic, relevant, and personalized communications. They engaged an automated marketing platform that correlates customer behaviors and their interactions with the retailer’s online product catalog. From these analytics, the platform dynamically builds intelligent, triggered campaigns that can be run across email and social media channels, or can be used to optimize search engine marketing. At the heart of the solution sits an AI-driven decisioning platform that determines the timing and content of the next-best campaign to send to individual shoppers. The platform decides what products to target each customer next, based on its understanding of the individual and the collective wisdom of all customers. It’s allowed the company to engage in a type of real-time, one-to-one marketing never before possible, and the campaign results speak for themselves.
When brothers Shep and Ian Murray cut their ties with Corporate America to start a little company on Martha’s Vineyard in 1998, their motivation was clear: “We’re making neck ties so we don’t have to wear them.”
Little did they know that the business they founded, Vineyard Vines, would become a darling of the fashion industry and a household brand name around the country.
Today, the company best known for its smiling pink whale logo offers much more than their signature neckwear. They manufacturer a full line of “exclusive, yet attainable” clothing and accessories for men, women, and children. That “little” privately-held business has grown tremendously since its launch and currently has more than 90 physical retail locations and a highly successful eCommerce business.
I met the team at Vineyard Vines while doing research about data-driven marketing technologies for my book, Marketing, Interrupted, and was able to learn firsthand about the company’s beginnings, and what has made them so successful today. From the very beginning, the Murray brothers adopted a guiding principle to authentically connect with and deeply understanding the unique needs of their customers. This principle has always been a priority for the leadership team at Vineyard Vines and it is still top of mind today. It is clear that the current VP of Marketing, Lindsey Worster, is committed to this principle, as she told me: “We are all about getting the right message, about the right product, at the right time to our customer — targeted, relevant, and authentic communication is our primary goal.”
Of course, this type of real-time, one-to-one marketing is easier said than done.
As Vineyard Vines has rapidly grown its customer base, so too has the size of its customer database grown. Terabytes of data have been captured. Hundreds of attributes, encompassing customer profiles, preferences, and buying behaviors must be parsed into actionable insights in order to deliver a highly personalized experience. Like many competitors in the apparel industry, Vineyard Vines has kept their operations lean in order to preserve operating margins. This means that they simply do not have the human resources to perform the onerous data analysis and behavioral segmentation needed to inform true one-to-one marketing. So, over the years, the retailer fell into the trap of relying on traditional “batch-and-blast” types of communications to reach their customers, promote products, and make offers. Of course, that trade-off was inconsistent with the guiding principles of the founders, but it was perceived to be the only way to keep the cash register ringing. But, Worster acknowledged, “With the batch-and-blast campaigns, we were sending the exact same message and static images to millions of people, and that just isn’t the best way to communicate with customers.
