December Winback
I am the designer for Rue’s “Winback” program - a series of monthly campaigns that target lapsed customers with credit and free shipping offers. This campaign uses the bulk of the marketing budget, but drives over 44 million dollars in gross demand annually.
Each campaign features a series of emails, onsite banners, and pop-ups to remind our lapsed members of what they’re missing. Below are assets from December 2022's “Ultra-High Value” campaign (targeting our most valuable lapsed customers).
When building a campaign like this with many interconnected assets, I start with what I consider the centerpiece of the campaign, in this case the initial email. To keep the content seasonal and relevant to the audience, I first look at the historical data of the brands and categories that the "Ultra-High Value" audience likes to shop. Data indicated that Gucci was the top brand and "beauty" was the top-category for them, so I chose images to match. We shoot our imagery in-house so I selected recently photographed images that had a holiday vibe to accompany the "gifting" copy.
Once the initial email is sent, it's time to build the aligning assets. Above are 2 examples of "site pop-ups" that remind our lapsed member of available credit for visiting RueLaLa.com before the offer ends. I work closely with the copywriter during the entire process to ensure that the type is organized in a way that reflects the intended hierarchy. In this case, the credit was most important and I prioritized it in the design.
Our "Ultra-High Value" campaigns often have multiple parts to maximize the number of members we can win back. Once the initial $25 Credit and free shipping offer concluded, it was time to send an upgraded offer to those who passed on the initial one. We updated the credit from $25 to $35 (our highest possible credit offer) for 3 days only. I chose new image categories and colors to go along with the email above. In this case, the urgency ("3 Days Only") was the most important copy so that is reflected in the design.
Above is an example of an on-site banner I designed to go along with this campaign. Our homepage is very visually busy, especially during December, so I tried to make this banner simple to avoid competing with our flash sales.
Analysis of campaign results demonstrated that this series was particularly successful and we exceeded our expectations for the amount of lapsed members we reactivated.