The Business

Oya Costumes was born out of a  love of dress-up that the founder’s children shared. Faten Hodroge, founder and president of the costume company established it in 2004 when ordering costumes online was a novel concept in Canada.

She takes pride in serving her niche market really well. The company makes it their business to really know their product, and that is why they can deliver the best service to their target market.

The Challenge

Hodroge fondly recalls the early days when her children served as her costume models. However, as her children have grown, so has the business.

While she finds email marketing to be a very effective way to reach a lot of customers, she needed a way that would make it work more efficiently with smart segmentation and automation. The goal was to be able to seamlessly integrate the email solution with the data on who purchased what so that they would not have to constantly import the data to keep it up to date.

They had been working with different products, but she wanted everything “under one umbrella” to reduce the need for manual processes and updates. It also had to be compatible with their Magento platform.

She reviewed many solutions on the market. Some had good email delivery but didn’t have the additional features they needed. Others failed to account for delivery across different devices and platforms so that they had to take a huge amount of time to manually adjust it for different browsers.

Some did deliver the data needed for segmentation but were not user friendly and very cumbersome to use. Anything that did meet all of Oya’s requirements and offered a smooth user experience was beyond its budget.

The Solution

Then Hodroge discovered Remarkety. It delivered optimized views email delivery, as well as automation and segmentation to allow the company to do that kind of follow up communication necessary to convert more customers.

“Remarkety was like a savior offering us what we wanted at a price we could afford,” she recalls.

While she appreciated it five years ago when they made the switch, she appreciates it even more now. One reason for that is that she is impressed that the company’s responsiveness continues after the customer signs up.

“Remarkety’s customer service is second to none,” she declares.

The other reason why the full value of Remarkety only is realized over time is because of its data integration. In the first year it didn’t yet build up historical data to work off, but once they were in the second year of use, it capitalized on the Magneto data is captured for better segmentation.

The Results

“I love the automation features,” Hodroge declares.

The abandoned cart emails work so well that she is amazed at the number of conversions that come through on the first one. As a result, she recaptures the sale even without having to offer a promotion code that would come through only on the second or third abandoned cart email.

“With Remarkety, 50% of their audience opens their first cart abandonment and welcome email campaigns. That says a lot about the power of such campaigns.”

But if it does take two or three emails, she knows that Remarkety has her covered, sending them out automatically after 24 hours then 36 then 48.

“I love that part — to be able to just set it and forget it.”

She also loves the view on customer data it gives, finding the information on par with an ERP system.

“Oya Costumes has seen excellent engagement from their automation. With an average open rate of 35%, they converted 8% and 9% of their welcome and cart abandonment email sequences. Their total conversion rate was a whopping 22% for their automated emails being sent with Remarkety.”

Using the data, they can now set defined goals for the business. For this year, for example, they would like to focus on the goal of using email to improve conversions by 25-30%.

One way they plan to implement that for this year’s Halloween season (obviously, their busiest time) is to target all customers who made a purchase last year but had not yet done so this year by September 30. They will also try to incentivize those last-minute shoppers to place their orders earlier in October by sending them messages about saving the express shipping fees by allowing time for their order to ship at the standard rate.

Aside from the emails that are designed to convert, they are using Remarkety to keep in touch with customers in general, directing to their blog content, for example. The blogs address some concerns customers may have about the limits of typical Halloween activities while pointing them to some of the products they sell, like Halloween decorations.

“Oya Costumes open rates for newsletters significantly improved with Remarkety, where they have had a consistent 15% open rate (on average) on their bi-weekly newsletters for the past year and a half.”

“Even if nobody in your home is going trick-or-treating, these Halloween decorations will spook the whole house,” declares one blog that suggests ways of decorating the home, one of the key trends for Halloween 2020.

Of this year’s season, she said, “Covid challenged us all to think outside the box. You have to  find ways to be creative and reconnect with your customer to find a bond to still drive the sale.”

Remarkety proved essential to that strategy because the best way to connect directly is through email, and having the data on who has bought before or at least demonstrated interest in the product is what makes it possible to have a baseline for contact.