Purebaby partners with Cheetah Digital to strengthen their customer journey

The baby clothing brand implemented Cheetah Digital’s platform to offer more personalized and real-time messaging to their customers at key milestones.

A Little Background

Purebaby is Australia’s largest independent babywear brand. The brand sits between luxury and budget baby clothing. Its founders, husband and wife team Sanjay Gill and Mirabai Winford, wanted to create a timeless, quality brand that was functional and fashionable to the market.

The brand has been running for more than 20 years and began as a wholesale brand selling to the likes of Myer and David Jones. In 2010, the business started its transition into retail. The company has 23 stores in Australia and distributes to more than seven countries worldwide, including the U.S., U.K., and the Middle East.

The Challenge

Purebaby was on the hunt for a software solution that would enable them to send personalized email messages to their existing and prospective customer base.

Before leveraging Cheetah Digital, Purebaby was using Bronto (before it was acquired by Oracle). However, it was only being used for batch-and-blast emails.

“You have a database, you’re sending them one electronic direct marketing campaign (EDM), and that was it.” Sanjay Gill, CEO at Purebaby, says, “With the old platform, we were not getting what we needed in terms of segmentation and personalisation. It felt as if we were not using our database to its fullest potential, so we decided we needed a change.”

Another issue Purebaby had was their support team was U.S.-based, which meant the Purebaby staff never had face-to-face meetings and seldom spoke with their provider. Purebaby wanted a locally based team to liaise with to offer more custom and real-time support.

“One of our conditions we had when we were onboarding with Cheetah Digital was for the teams to talk on a regular basis. There was an endless number of sessions that happened between our teams where we mapped out critical journeys for our customers,” Sanjay explained.

The Solution

In July 2018, Purebaby turned to Cheetah Digital, sat down and mapped out an entire customer journey to decide at exactly which touchpoints the retailer wished to interact with their customers.

“During those sessions, we mapped out the entire journey. such as which touchpoints were especially sensitive and important to our customers, such as when they announce they’re having a baby, to having the baby,” Sanjay says.

From those sessions, Cheetah Digital helped create a bespoke number of “series,” which were personalised EDMs aimed at their customers’ experience at each critical touchpoint.

• Milestone series: For a baby’s first birthday, for example
• Welcome series: Welcoming a new customer
• Size-up series: When the baby needs a bigger size of clothing
• Due date series: For mothers about to give birth Purebaby also tries to incorporate highly personalised EDMs for milestones such as a first birthday or a baby shower when parents give that specific information.

“As an example, we mapped out the birthday journey,” Sanjay explains. “When the customer is having a birthday or the baby’s first birthday — there’s a whole journey regarding those milestones. A whole journey was mapped out by Purebaby and Cheetah Digital. There were specific campaigns built around it and those campaigns were triggered at different times.”

Cheetah Digital and Purebaby also worked on a “welcome series,” so when a customer signs up to the loyalty program called “Pure Love,” there are a series of personalised emails sent to them. These aren’t marketing emails, they are beautiful, introductory, experiential messages, introducing the parent to the brand, and showing them why Purebaby is special and what products they offer.

“Our loyalty program is data-driven, as you come into the store, you sign up and it’s offline and online. This means a customer could walk into our store or could go to the website, sign up, and the journey will be the same,” Sanjay explains.

Purebaby also has a “size-up” trigger for parents with newborn babies informing them it may be time to buy the next size-up for the newborn’s clothes.

“Receiving that email knowing the parents are busy and they may not have time to go to the shop, receiving that email is very helpful from the feedback we hear. It also gives them time to plan if they’ve placed the order, it will be delivered in 24-hours, it does help the parents,” Sanjay explains.

The “due date series” is sent to mothers who tell Purebaby their due date and they are sent helpful content pre- and post-birth, such as hospital checklists.

“We realised a lot of people were entering the parenting journey underprepared. The due date series is about helping parents be prepared, we send them the hospital checklist, we send them the first wardrobe checklist. If someone has done that work for you and it is a matter of purchasing it, it makes it easier. It goes back to making parenthood easier for customers and make the journey easier,” Sanjay says.

Results

Through engaging with Cheetah Digital, the “welcome series” EDM has a 50% engagement rate; the “due date” EDM campaign has a 70% open rate and 14% unique click rate and the “size-up program” is performing on par with the “welcome series” at a 50% engagement rate.

Since implementing Cheetah Digital, Purebaby’s revenue has grown 47% compared to the prior year. Its email channel has become Purebaby’s second-highest revenue-driving channel.

Between November 2020 and October 2021, email accounted for 21% of Purebaby’s total revenue and 16% of its total traffic, in the same period a year prior, its email accounted for 19.5% of its total revenue and 15.8% of its total traffic.

Like many brands, Purebaby was concerned about the pandemic when it first hit Australian shores in March. Their retail sales halted and their digital sales took off. Sanjay says Purebaby was slowly undergoing digital transformation and COVID accelerated it for them. Within weeks, 90% of our sales were coming from digital, whereas previously only 10% of their sales came from online retail.

“Our retail versus online sales has balanced to 50/50, the digital sales have not gone backwards, they are much higher but the retail is standing on its own,” Sanjay says. “Having a good platform, especially a good engagement platform like Cheetah Digital where we were able to ramp up our engagement with the customer was important for us.”

When Purebaby was in the process of onboarding with Cheetah Digital, one of the stipulations was that both teams had to communicate regularly. From that, Sanjay says the Purebaby team and the Cheetah Digital team were in constant conversation and had many productive and innovative sessions together.

Currently, Purebaby is only using Cheetah Digital’s mail delivery platform. In the future, Sanjay and the Purebaby team are exploring the possibility of using Cheetah Digital’s CDP platform.

“We are very proud of our partnership with Cheetah Digital. Going forward, we are exploring the opportunities of using Cheetah’s CDP platform and using their loyalty program too,” Sanjay ends.