Collectors increases engagement by 125% through CRM & loyalty to drive incremental revenue
Collectors is a leading platform for collectible enthusiasts. With more than 85 million collectibles graded, Collectors provides a trusted service that protects and verifies items, enhancing their value. Their flagship brand, PSA, dominates the trading card grading market and is recognized as the gold standard across the industry.
Results
- Increased click-through-rates from 1.9% to 4.3% (125% increase in engagement)
- Increased email open rates to 53%
- Activated 10% of new customers and reactivated 25% of churned customers through Loyalty program
- Powered advanced targeting and personalization strategies for over 400 email variants
- Reduced campaign execution time from one month to a single day
The Challenge
Collectors has thousands of users visit their websites every day looking for help with their collectibles. A large portion of Collectors revenue comes from item grading and user-submitted items. The main focus for growing revenue is increasing user submissions by finding new customers and reactivating existing customers.
To increase user submissions they wanted to create a loyalty program to increase more customer retention and deliver more engaging offers to attract new customers. However, in order to build an effective loyalty program, they knew they needed access to more of their customer data, faster.
The marketing team relied on Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) to orchestrate all lifecycle marketing campaigns and customer journeys across channels, but they operated with a very limited amount of data. Any time they wanted to target a new audience or launch or test a new campaign, they had to submit a ticket to the data team. It could take anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks for that data to be made available in SFMC, which meant they couldn't launch a highly personalized loyalty program.
“Every company wants to increase incremental revenue via customer loyalty, but the key to building super customers is personalization. That’s exactly what Hightouch unlocks for us–one platform to manage all of our customer data and one platform to orchestrate all of our campaigns.”
Mikey Osborn
Director of Growth Marketing & Technology at Collectors
The Solution
For Collectors to launch their loyalty program, they needed access to all their customer data, specifically historical customer submissions, and categories, but this data was only available in their data warehouse. In search of a solution that would allow the marketing team to activate all of their customer data across any channel, Collectors knew they needed a Composable CDP that integrated with their existing data infrastructure.
The Hightouch Composable CDP lets them build audiences directly from their data warehouse, allowing them to immediately access 100% of their data in a flexible way without having to build complex integrations with Salesforce.
Faster Campaign Execution and Hyper-Personalization
To make their lifecycle marketing as effective as possible, the marketing team wanted to drive incremental revenue and needed their customer data within Salesforce, ideally sub-hourly. They needed to create segments on all of their customer data. However, the long delays in getting the required data often meant the marketing team was forced to perform broad personalization or, worse, unable to even launch new campaigns.
With Hightouch, the marketing team can build any audience in seconds using any data point available in their data warehouse and sync that data immediately to SFMC for marketing use cases. Instead of submitting IT tickets for data requests, they can now self-serve, reducing campaign creation and execution time from weeks to minutes.
“Hightouch doesn’t just give us access to data. It unlocks campaign velocity. We’re able to segment audiences on any data point and spin up a new campaign in SFMC in minutes. The time it takes to launch a new campaign has gone from weeks to minutes.”
Mikey Osborn
Director of Growth Marketing & Technology at Collectors
They can also trigger new email flows, such as an educational welcome sequence for new users or a re-engagement sequence for those who have only made one submission. The ability to access information like the categories of items a user submitted allows them to tailor email messages and images to resonate with each individual user. This advanced segmentation doubled their email open rate; and in eight months, they created 400 distinct emails for different audiences.
“Hightouch has allowed us to completely supercharge our lifecycle marketing program and engage with our users in ways that were never before possible. We’ve activated thousands of new customers in our first few months using the product, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Mikey Osborn
Director of Growth Marketing & Technology at Collectors
Powering Customer Loyalty to Drive Incremental Revenue
The key to any successful loyalty program is personalization—delivering the right message at the right time for the right user. Before Hightouch, this was impossible. Since implementing Hightouch, they can now segment on any data point, offering coupons and discounts specific to every customer.
The marketing team can personalize users' content based on previously submitted item categories, offer incentives for similar submissions, segment users based on the last time they made submissions, and offer a coupon to re-engage them. Doing so provides customers with content they actually want, leading to higher engagement and retention, which drives more repeat submissions and revenue for the business.
This new initiative has activated 10% of new customers and reactivated 25% of churned customers, increasing email engagement by 125% in just four months, which would not have been possible without Hightouch.
“The level of personalization that we're orchestrating through our loyalty program would not be possible without Hightouch. Since we started using Higthouch, we’ve gone from a 1.9% to 4.3% click-through rate—that’s 125% increase in engagement in our emails.”
Mikey Osborn
Director of Growth Marketing & Technology at Collectors
What’s Next
With the success of their loyalty program, the marketing team is exploring other ways to bring their personalization into campaigns and new experiments they can launch. One area they are looking to explore is paid media, which will also benefit from rapid launch velocity and better targeting to improve ROAS.