Keep Customers Engaged All Year Long: How Artifact Uprising Uses Personalization to Power Retention
From Holiday Spikes to Year-Round Engagement: The Real Challenge
Coming off the holiday season, most retail marketers face a familiar issue: a huge influx of new customers and email subscribers, followed by a drop-off in engagement. According to the National Retail Foundation, average retail sales jump 20% in November and December, and monthly email list growth more than doubles—from 2.5% to 6%. But once gifting season ends, engagement often falls. Promotions are fewer, spending slows, and inboxes get cleaned out.
So how do you keep those new customers engaged and coming back?
Strategy 1: Build Rich Profiles to Personalize Campaigns
Katie Richardson, Director of Customer Retention Marketing at Artifact Uprising, explains how her team is turning seasonal shoppers into long-term loyalists. It starts with building detailed customer profiles:
- Enable Social Sign-In: By removing friction from email subscription forms, Artifact Uprising boosts opt-ins and gains access to customer data that can be used for personalized messaging and retargeting.
- Capture Acquisition Source: Storing this as a custom variable lets them personalize onboarding flows. Customers acquired via different channels may need different messaging or pacing.
- Ask for Preferences Upfront: When customers sign up, they’re asked which product category they’re shopping for—photo books, prints, frames, or specific use cases like weddings or babies. This helps personalize messaging from the first touchpoint.
Strategy 2: Use AI-Powered Product Recommendations to Drive Repeat Purchases
Artifact Uprising has started using AI to power personalized product recommendations:
- They conducted an A/B test comparing dynamic PDP (product detail page) images based on user history vs. creative-curated images. The result: a 10% lift in unique clicks for the AI-powered version.
- These recommendation blocks are dynamically inserted in emails using customer category affinities.
- Beyond clicks, this data helps identify cross-sell opportunities. For example, customers who buy books might be nudged toward frames or prints in follow-up campaigns.
Strategy 3: Trigger Emails Based on Real-Time Behaviors
Artifact Uprising has built sophisticated triggered journeys for:
- Abandoned Carts
- Abandoned Projects (customers who start designing a product but don’t complete it)
Using timestamped on-site events—like viewing a page, starting a project, or adding to cart—they create workflows tailored to the product each customer interacted with. These journeys are:
- Dynamic: Product images and next steps are personalized based on the customer’s prior actions.
- Effective: These flows have delivered up to a 50% increase in conversion rates compared to static email triggers.
Strategy 4: Keep Customers Engaged Between Purchases with Content
Because Artifact Uprising sells photo products, content marketing plays a central role in keeping customers engaged between purchase cycles:
- Tips & Tricks for Better Photo Products: From organizing your photo library to curating better prints.
- Free Downloadables: Like wall art that can be printed or framed.
- Blog Articles & Guides: Educational and inspirational content that links directly to relevant products.
Content emails like these can drive 25% more unique clicks compared to standard messages and are especially effective during off-peak seasons.
Expert Q&A with Katie Richardson
How do you re-engage customers who have unsubscribed from email?
Katie emphasized using other channels like SMS, push notifications, and live app content. Artifact Uprising also coordinates closely with their paid media team to retarget these users based on purchase and browsing data.
What other zero- and first-party data points matter beyond email?
- Event Tracking: Page views, add-to-cart, project starts, etc.
- Preference Collection: Product interests, occasion (e.g., weddings, babies).
- Behavioral Tags: Used to create more meaningful segments and refine targeting.
What impact has AI-powered personalization had?
AI recommendations not only increased click-throughs but also helped Artifact Uprising:
- Understand product-category cross-sell behavior.
- Guide customers into new product lines (e.g., frames or prints after buying a book).
Favorite Campaigns That Drove Results?
- Abandoned Cart & Abandoned Project Journeys: Swapping generic messages for dynamic, personalized ones has improved conversion rates by up to 50%.
What’s Next for Personalization at Artifact Uprising?
Katie’s team is testing ways to pull customer image galleries from AWS and use them in personalized emails—showcasing actual user-uploaded images to encourage follow-up purchases or reorders.
Final Takeaway: Personalization Is the Thread That Ties It All Together
From custom onboarding journeys and behavior-triggered emails to AI-driven recommendations and photo-based retargeting, Artifact Uprising is demonstrating how to build a retention engine that lasts all year.
And it all hinges on understanding the customer—through data, context, and content.
As Katie put it: “Every interaction is an opportunity to learn one more thing about the customer. The more we understand, the more value we can provide beyond the transaction.”
