At Marigold Engage by Sailthru, we firmly believe that personalization is crucial to every company. But at JustFab, the company’s entire business model is predicated upon personalization. JustFab is based on the premise that a technology-enabled personal stylist can save shoppers time, money and heartache by learning their preferences and selecting just the right items for their wardrobes.

When a visitor first lands on the JustFab site, she’s presented with a short, fun quiz designed to identify her style preferences. JustFab uses that initial information to place a highly-curated selection of clothing and accessories in the customer’s online boutique. As shoppers browse, reject, and buy different items, JustFab uses Marigold Engage by Sailthru’s personalization and recommendation engines to curate her selection in accordance with her individual tastes.

Here, we spoke with Monica Deretich, VP of customer relationship management for JustFab and ShoeDazzle, to learn exactly how JustFab uses personalization to drive customer purchases and retention.

SAILTHRU: How do you think about customer retention?

MONICA DERETICH: We’re extremely focused on customer retention at JustFab. There’s obviously a cost associated with acquiring a customer, and it is much more cost-effective to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one. There’s natural attrition for every retailer, but we want to make sure that we keep our members happy and that everything we put in front of them is relevant, with the goal of retaining them. We personalize with the goal of retaining our members for as long as we can, and generating and growing their customer lifetime value.

SAILTHRU: How do you use personalization to reach those goals?

MONICA DERETICH: We started with Personalized Send Time, and saw really nice lifts.  

As we learn more about our members, we’re creating custom variables to store some of that information. Then we can dynamically personalize the content that each of those members sees in their email. More recently, we started looking at additional custom variables that give us new opportunities to communicate with our customers. Now we’re using personalization to generate dynamic product recommendations. We’re really excited to start learning from that, and to begin using it in our day-to-day marketing.

SAILTHRU: What misconceptions do your peers and colleagues have about personalization?

MONICA DERETICHLook, personalization requires a lot of resources internally, and complete buy-in from your own company to get live. What people don’t realize is that, in the end, it really is worth it.

SAILTHRU: What’s next for JustFab and your personalization road map?

We want to take our one-to-one recommendations and combine them with custom segmentation. We want to find a way to leverage different content feeds for different scenarios.  What we put in front of our members when they are making a return, for example, should be different than what we’re going to put in front of them when they’re lapsed, or when we want to reward them for being a great member.

The other thing we’ve seen is that by using new triggers for recurring campaigns, we’re now able to communicate to our members at the moment when they need to hear from us.  Over time, we think that will boost customer retention and lifetime value, too.

Learn more about how JustFab increased email revenue and repeat purchases in our best practice guide to increasing repeat purchase rates!