How Overstock Used Braze to Boost Engagement with Personalized, Real-Time Messaging

Over the past 20 years, the rise of personal computers, the internet, and mobile devices has fundamentally reshaped what the retail space looks like, from consumer expectations to the ways that goods are displayed, sold, shipped, and marketed. In today’s fast-moving retail and eCommerce landscape, it can be helpful to learn by example—and few brands provide a better example to follow than Overstock.com.

From the overstock inventory that gave the company its name to the new and quality homegoods that make up its offerings today, Overstock has been serving up interesting products and great deals to its customer base for more than two decades. Staying ahead of the curve for that long is no small feat—but Overstock has consistently excelled when it comes to customer engagement by staying agile, thoughtful, and leveraging technology effectively to better understand and reach their audience.

Smaller Sends, Big Results

Email has long been a key channel for Overstock when it comes to communicating effectively with customers. But as technology evolved and consumer expectations evolved with them, Overstock decided to migrate its customer messaging—including email—over to the Braze platform, in order to send more targeted, more effective outreach to their customers and to provide the coordinated cross-channel experiences that exemplifies exceptional customer engagement.

By leveraging Braze to improve their message targeting and personalization, Overstock was able to more effectively segment their audience, allowing the company to prioritize the customer experience and drive strong engagement while sending fewer messages. Even better, they were able to make the change quickly—within just a few short months of switching to Braze, Overstock decreased email sends by substantial margins, allowing them to communicate more efficiently with customers.

What Success Looks Like: Stronger Open Rates, Engagement, and Conversions

By strategically sending fewer, yet more relevant emails, Overstock provided its audience with a more relevant, valuable customer experience—and saw fantastic results to boot.

With Braze, Overstock was able to set up automated messaging throughout the customer lifecycle in order to ensure that users were receiving the right message on the right platform, as well as that those messages were personalized in useful ways. For instance, Overstock took advantage of the Braze platform’s Connected Content feature to automatically highlight products that recipients had recently viewed but not purchased—and then leveraged Braze’s cross-channel orchestration capabilities to trigger a push notification to alert email recipients that Overstock had saved a recently-viewed item and nudge them to close the deal.

That kind of messaging can do a lot to keep your brand front-of-mind and encourage conversions. When Overstock sent their users product alert emails to notify them when an item they’d browsed dropped in price or was almost out of stock, the campaign saw a 21% conversion rate and an open rate of 38%. That’s 3x higher than industry benchmarks for open rates, while their unique clicks clocked in at 9x higher than industry benchmarks.

Among customers who have previously made a purchase with Overstock, those engaged across multiple messaging channels—for instance, receiving both emails and push notifications—are more likely to come back and visit the company’s website or mobile app. By leveraging cross-channel messaging, Overstock.com saw increased engagement across app/web sessions, which created a stronger customer/brand relationship.

Final Thoughts

Age doesn’t always result in wisdom. But when it comes to Overstock, the company’s track record of continued customer engagement innovation over the past 20 years speak for themselves—and speaks loudly. Their strategic use of triggered outreach, message personalization, smart segmentation, and cross-channel engagement sets a high bar for marketing, growth, and engagement teams, but one that’s worth reaching for.

Check out Overstock.com to learn more about what the brand has to offer.

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