How True Vintage maximizes retention (while minimizing discounts) during retail’s most competitive weekend

About True Vintage

True Vintage was born in 2014 by Rory Westbrook, a university student with a love for fashion, bold, stand-out designs and a passion for wearing clothes that are different to what you’d see everyone else wearing. The brand’s come a long way since 2014, partnering with the likes of Tommy Hilfiger at their 2017 London Fashion Week event as well as hosting a series of pop-up events at various Urban Outfitters stores around the UK.

Operating in a fast-paced ‘drop culture’ industry, the True Vintage team photographs and uploads 200 products per day to their site, which means time is always of the essence to introduce fresh products and content to keep their customers engaged.

The Challenge

True Vintage is no stranger to the complications felt by most retailers in 2020: an increase in digital competition and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), with decreases in consumer attention span, ROAS, and internal resources to keep up with demand.

To add to these complications, Cyber Weekend – the biggest and most competitive weekend in retail for traffic and sales – was just around the corner. With campaign planning underway, True Vintage wanted to pivot away from relying solely on heavy discounts to prevent cutting into profit margins. Instead, they set their sights on retaining the customers who already know, shop and love their brand and are most likely to make a purchase.

The Solution

The True Vintage team collaborated with their Nosto CSM to create a unique experience for loyal customers and subscribers. Through a VIP tier service, the brand gave extra attention to their community of purchase-savvy customers – without allocating extra time internally to execute.

True Vintage’s Cyber Weekend sale strategy was twofold: they aimed to create an experience that offered easier access to their products, while also limiting the scope of their sale to shoppers who are most likely to convert and drive higher AOV.

To promote the sale, the purchase-savvy customers were added to a VIP segment that was then imported to the brand’s ESP, Klaviyo. Using a specific UTM link leading back to their site, True Vintage launched an email campaign that gave these shoppers (and only these shoppers) early access to their Cyber Weekend sale.

Now that True Vintage was honing in on the customers who are likely to convert, encouraging them to discover relevant and complementary products was the next step in offering a VIP experience.

Using Nosto’s Content Personalization, the brand implemented incremental discount messaging on their Product Cart pages to drive higher order value. This messaging highlighted a customer’s current cart value and the additional amount needed to hit the next discount threshold. This made it clear to the shopper how much more they’d need to spend to achieve an even higher discount.

Simultaneously, each customer was shown well-positioned Product Recommendations filtered to show only the most relevant products. These recommendations are a permanent fixture on True Vintage’s site.

The Results

True Vintage team didn’t have to worry about launching their personalization strategy on time. Using Nosto’s Scheduling feature, the brand scheduled their content campaigns ahead of time – giving them peace of mind to focus on other business needs and goals during BFCM saving them precious time.

The True Vintage team got the results they wanted without relying on discounting strategies. During Black Friday weekend:

Average order value increased significantly by 15%
Conversion rate more than doubled (156% increase)
Average visit value almost tripled

This was the start of many successful campaigns for True Vintage and Nosto – one of which included the launch of a gift card banner that only took 10 minutes to implement – and the brand is now setting their sights on applying the same level of automated personalization to their app as well.

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