One of Australia’s largest online retailers of costumes, accessories, and party supplies, Costumes.com.au, has partnered with dotdigital to help with audience segmentation, detailed customer insights and increased engagement.

Costumes.com.au wanted to enhance its marketing strategy to gain a competitive edge and undertake a thorough clean-up of its database to segment active and inactive customers. Hence, the retailer was on the lookout for a marketing automation partner to address those challenges and market more strategically to engage customers. 

“Technology has been our strong suit and at the forefront in addressing issues along the way. Thanks to dotdigital, not only do we have access to more customer data and insights, but also better engagement rates,” Costumes.com.au marketing manager, Anita Williams said.

Costumes.com.au has used dotdigital to run successful automated programs including welcome series, anniversary email campaigns, abandoned cart and abandoned browse programs. The welcome series strategy has seen positive traction, with an increasing number of customers updating their profiles, enabling the team to use the data to craft personalised campaigns.

“The journey with dotdigital has been a huge success; our creative vision and dotdigital’s capability to turn it into reality has delivered outstanding results,” Williams added.

“Deep diving into customer interests and data, effective segmentation, and targeting has resulted in lower unsubscribe rates, better open rates, and zero email fatigue. Our anniversary campaign resulted in revenue uplift, while our Easter campaign had amazing customer engagement.”

As parties and celebrations came to a pause during Covid lockdowns, the brand reimagined the way it engaged with customers by educating them on alternate, safer ways to party, inspiring them to download free invitations for online celebrations, celebrating Halloween at home, while encouraging parents to host virtual parties for kids.

“One of the key projects on the horizon is the Magento 2 migration. In the near future, we plan to run loyalty and rewards strategies using the dotdigital Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) value modelling tool. We are also excited about our upcoming Halloween-based lead nurturing program,” Williams said.

The Christmas-themed abandoned browse emails performed well with a 39% open rate and a 25% click-to-open rate. The abandoned cart campaign witnessed a 34% open rate and a 16% click-to-open rate. Additionally, the ‘Book Week’ campaign saw an average open rate of 27%.

Overall, Costumes.com.au recorded a 30% year-over-year increase in revenue from email and an 11.35% increase in the loyal customer segment, since partnering with dotdigital.

Based in Melbourne, Costumes.com.au has more than 10,000 items for people of all ages, and ships all over Australia and New Zealand. Since being founded in 2008, the company has shipped more than 500,000 costumes.