A perfect fit: How Suitsupply scaled personalization and increased conversions 

Maintaining a consistent yet personalized brand experience—from online and in-person interactions to packaging, apparel, and marketing efforts—is vital for retail businesses. For Suitsupply, a pioneering international high-end men's fashion brand, personalization isn't just a feature; it's a cornerstone of their business model.

The marketing team at Suitsupply plays a crucial role—they can be the sole touchpoint that encourages a purchase or the reason someone abandons their cart for good. As Suitsupply expanded, the team recognized significant gaps in their marketing campaigns: a lack of brand consistency, collaboration issues between teams, and missed conversion opportunities. With ambitious goals but limited resources, they faced a challenge. How could they tackle these issues without further straining their small team?

• The challenge: To boost event and segment-based personalization in their customer engagement campaigns, maintain strict brand standards, streamline design requests, and create scalable programs that could grow with their business and easily adapt to their seasonal product offerings.
  
• The strategy: Using Customer.io, Suitsupply automated complex email programs based on customer behavior, providing relevant onboarding and post-purchase campaigns. This automation reduced the strain on design resources to maintain brand standards across all communications.
  
• The result: Personalized email campaigns achieved 5-7x more engagement and 5-10x higher conversion than standard messaging, with brand standards upheld across all email communications and web properties, even with a small design team.

Shoppers looking for high-quality professional wear, like suits, care deeply about aesthetics and personal touch, and they expect this same level of attention in brand communications. For a retailer like Suitsupply, email, and marketing must evoke the same polished feeling as putting on a high-quality suit—something customers can truly see themselves in.

However, the Suitsupply team identified several gaps in conveying value to shoppers. Analyzing their current campaigns revealed missed personalization opportunities, underutilized engagement strategies, overly generic messaging, and low conversion rates— especially among website browsers abandoning their carts.

The team focused first on revamping their core marketing campaigns, including onboarding, the "Shop the Look" initiative, and re-engagement efforts.

For their onboarding emails, they concentrated on enhancing the post-purchase experience. Their original emails were generic and failed to engage customers and drive conversions, so they embraced deeper personalization. With a revamped email flow, customers were sent a series of emails after making a purchase, providing care instructions and educational resources on the origins of the fabrics used! With the extra attention and special touch, customers loved it.

The team aimed to drive cross-category purchases through their "Shop the Look" campaign. To achieve this, they built a campaign showcasing complementary items, such as specific shirts or ties, following a suit purchase. Engagement with these personalized emails doubled when they included a photo of the sales associate who assisted the customer.

To better re-engage shoppers and entice them to check out, the Suitsupply team set up an abandoned cart email campaign. If items were added to the cart but weren't purchased, shoppers received timely reminders about the items they'd left behind.

To ensure accuracy, Suitsupply integrated SKU-level behavioral data from their data warehouse, allowing them to leverage first-party customer data for timely and specific messaging. As a result, these campaign automations drove 5-10x more order conversions than their previous email campaigns!

While tailored emails effectively supported Suitsupply’s business goals, SKU-level personalization introduced significant challenges—most notably, the overwhelming number of email variants. This strained their small but mighty design team, responsible for managing email, web, and advertising creatives across multiple projects.

To solve this, the team utilized Customer.io to create pre-approved templates that could be reused, automating the input of product images into individual emails. This streamlined the design process, significantly reducing the workload for both marketers and designers. With this approach, the growth marketing team could implement complex branding logic and integrate detailed event data without requiring designers to create each email from scratch. The Suitsupply design team saved countless hours by using automations in Customer.io!

Automation ensured that branding elements and product data were seamlessly integrated with minimal manual input, improving team collaboration and increasing efficiency without compromising Suitsupply’s brand values or customer care.

As Suitsupply transformed their customer email experience, they recognized the importance of using clean data to deliver the most relevant and valuable communications. This approach helped them avoid duplicate or irrelevant emails that could erode customer trust in their brand.

The Suitsupply team integrated their customer data platform (CDP) with Customer.io, enabling them to use real-time data for accurate and hyper-personalized messaging. This data was vital not only for product onboarding, cross-selling, and abandoned cart campaigns but also for enhancing the overall customer experience at every touchpoint.

Beyond the customer lifecycle, the team identified an opportunity to proactively improve experiences for unhappy customers. By integrating net promoter score (NPS) data from their data warehouse, BigQuery, into Customer.io, Suitsupply could automate email outreach to connect dissatisfied customers with their support team—all on autopilot. This strategy turns negative brand interactions into positive experiences, further strengthening customer relationships.

Suitsupply's partnership with Customer.io has transformed their email marketing strategy. They shifted from generic newsletter-based marketing communications to a highly personalized and custom-branded customer engagement powerhouse. At every touchpoint of a customer's journey with Suitsupply, they now receive a tailored and consistent brand experience.

Fueled by first-party data, behavior-based actions, and automation, Suitsupply's marketing and design teams can now do more—more accurately and with less effort—than ever before. This newfound efficiency has empowered the growth marketing team to iterate, innovate, and expand their capabilities. In Customer.io, Suitsupply has found their perfect fit.

Ready to elevate your brand’s customer engagement? Discover how Customer.io can help you create data-driven campaigns that drive real results. Start your 14-day free trial today.