How The Iconic increased conversions through personalisation
Since implementing Braze, the online retail leader has increased its conversion rate and significantly reduced its unsubscribes.
The Iconic is Australia and New Zealand’s leading fashion and lifestyle e-commerce platform, connecting over 2 million active customers with more than 2000 global and local brands across women’s, men’s, sports, kids, beauty and home.
Since launching in 2011, The Iconic has stayed at the forefront of Australia’s e-commerce sector by leveraging technology to pioneer a seamless and inspiring shopping experience. With fast delivery and free and easy returns a part of its DNA, The Iconic offers customers convenience, choice and confidence in shopping online.
However, with competition in online retail increasing, The Iconic needed to invest in personalising its marketing campaigns and shopping experiences, particularly within its mobile app, to remain at the top of customers’ minds. Because it sends millions of messages a day, efficiency was key.
To reduce the time spent on manual processes while maintaining effective customer engagement, The Iconic turned to Braze, the leading customer engagement platform that allows marketers to creatively engage with customers across channels in real time from one platform.
Cutting through a crowded market
The rise of e-commerce, digital marketing and social media has made it increasingly difficult for online retailers like The Iconic to cut through and capture consumers’ attention. This has had implications for customer acquisition, retention and ultimately, conversion and sales.
“People’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, and customers expect to get a lot more tailored marketing and content to them,” Andrew Goldstein, senior CRM manager at The Iconic, said. “When we take a step back and look at the area we want our CRM to play and the value we want it to generate for the business, it’s really about going down that personalisation route.”
Before launching Braze, The Iconic was using different personalisation tools for different channels, some of which couldn’t keep up with the brand’s growing scale and ambition.
In terms of the basics, like email targeting, it wasn’t up to the standard of what people would expect today,Andrew Goldstein, Senior CRM manager, The Iconic
Another challenge was usability. Because of employee turnover, any solution The Iconic chose to implement had to be easy for non-technical team members to use.
Delivering cost-effective personalisation at scale
The Iconic was looking for a flexible and user-friendly marketing platform that made sense for the business on a commercial level and could deliver personalisation at scale. Braze fit the bill on all these fronts.
With Braze, The Iconic was not only able to tailor its email subject lines and SMS notifications to specific customer segments but also send personalised push notifications to app users, something it was not able to do previously.
Braze also enabled The Iconic to show users different products and messages in its app based on their purchase histories and browsing behaviour. “It’s great because when we personalise our storefront, that’s when we see a lot of the increase in traffic,” Goldstein said.
Braze’s built-in reporting tools also enabled The Iconic to measure the uplift of different personalisation levers. “It’s a great tool for experimenting and getting a better understanding of what the key lever is going to be,” Goldstein added.
Crucially, The Iconic could achieve this with Braze’s core functionality by splitting up its email send, so it could compare the impact of personalised messages with generic messages. It didn’t need to upgrade its subscription to access more advanced features, as with many other platforms.
“I’ve been in this space for quite some time and I’ve never seen a platform that can personalise an app the way that Braze does,” Goldstein said.
Providing true partnership and support
While The Iconic was one of the first retailers in Australia to use Braze, the overall onboarding process was smooth.
“There are always things that may not have been scoped in the initial project, but both teams worked very collaboratively together to get a successful outcome,” Goldstein said.
Since implementing Braze, The Iconic has maintained a strong partnership with the platform’s customer success team to consistently iterate and improve its strategy.
We have regular catch-ups every two weeks, and they’ve given us some really good suggestionsAndrew Goldstein, Senior CRM manager, The Iconic
For example, Braze came up with a clever and cost-effective way for The Iconic to improve the customer experience of applying voucher codes in the app by repurposing an existing feature.
“I’ve been impressed at how Braze listens to our needs as a brand. It makes for a really solid partnership.” Goldstein said.
As he pointed out, the more value The Iconic can get out of Braze, the more likely the company is to unlock further investment in the future.
“We’ve just signed up for another couple of years,” he noted.
IMPROVING THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND CONVERSIONS
1-1.5% increase in conversion rate
30% average decrease in unsubcribes
Since implementing Braze, The Iconic has made significant strides in personalising its marketing campaigns and in-app promotions, product merchandising and content. This has had a positive impact on the customer experience.
“Braze has been a great tech tool to deliver our fantastic results,” Goldstein said. “We’ve been able to increase our conversion rate by about 1 to 1.5 per cent, which may not sound like a lot, but at the same time, we’ve also decreased our unsubscribes by 30 per cent on average.”
In 2021 and 2023, KPMG ranked The Iconic in its list of the top 10 brands for customer experience excellence in Australia, and its app continues to be one of the most popular fashion apps in Australia, with over 6.8 million downloads.
Based on the retailer’s success with Braze so far, Goldstein would like to tap into some of the platform’s more advanced features, such as AI.
“One of our key goals for 2025 is to have more personalised one-on-one conversations with our customers. The only way to achieve that is to enable these features with Braze,” he said.
Doubling down on personalisation
The Iconic has long been recognised as a leader in Australia’s e-commerce industry, thanks to its strong focus on technology and the customer experience of shopping online and on mobile. But to stay ahead of the competition, the retailer needed to enhance its personalisation capabilities.
The Iconic selected Braze to help it target customers more effectively and efficiently across channels, including email, SMS and most importantly, mobile app. Now, it can personalise its marketing campaigns, promotions and push notifications based on customers’ purchase histories and browsing behaviour, and even tailor the products and brands users see when they open the app. As a result, the retailer has increased its conversion rate and significantly reduced its unsubscribes.
With plans to launch a loyalty program in the near future, The Iconic is more focused on personalisation than ever, and Goldstein expects Braze to play a key role in this. While every retailer has different needs and objectives, he would advise all companies to at least consider the platform.
“It depends on what’s going to fit into your ecosystem best, but if you’re looking at different platforms, then Braze should 100 per cent be on your list of vendors to reach out to,” he said.
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