Blueshift Customer Stories: James Allen Increases Engagement Through Dynamic, Personalized Experiences

There are a few monumental purchases we make in our lives like getting our first car, purchasing a home, and buying an engagement ring. These purchases are traditionally done in person — but have become increasingly more popular online as consumer preferences shift towards the convenience of online shopping and more established trust in these online retailers as the years go by and more people have positive experiences buying engagement rings online. For the marketers in these “newly digital” spaces, simply replicating the traditional offline cycle is extremely difficult and might not be effective for a digitally native audience. Rather, forward-thinking companies, like James Allen, have carved out a new, highly-personalized way of approaching marketing to customers where each customer’s experience is 100% unique and (quite literally) life-changing.

James Allen, a leading online retailer for engagement rings and other high-end jewelry, wants to make the process of ring shopping online as simple and un-intimidating as possible. And ring shopping for their customers became a breeze — behind the scenes this was all made possible with Blueshift’s SmartHub CDP, which enabled them to execute a long, considered customer journey that requires the right balance between messaging users with tailored product recommendations while being discreet and respectful in their approach. Their legacy tech could not collect and unify their first-party data from their website, email campaigns, and more, which prevented the team from surfacing tailored recommendations from their dynamic catalog. Their previous platform also offered limited visibility into campaign performance and solving any issue had prolonged waiting-periods, leading to missed opportunities and lost revenue.

As James Allen cycled through numerous marketing solutions and still couldn’t craft the intricate, dynamic journeys their business needed, they realized they needed to change their approach. So, they sought out not only a new platform but a true technology partner. James Allen prides itself on being a fast-moving, dynamic company and any partner would need to have a similar ethos. It was also essential that this partner provided the ability to deliver 1:1, dynamic recommendations, full use of their customer data, and access to real-time customer events such as browsing activity, recent searches, viewed items, items added to cart, etc. to enable personalized customer experiences. This search led them to Blueshift, which could help them achieve all their objectives  — and be a true partner as they grew and evolved.

To deliver highly-personalized, informative, and respectful customer experiences — James Allen turned to Blueshift because of their unique ability to create journeys that adapt to each user based on their preference, affinities, website behaviors, and more — not just a one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. Blueshift’s ability to ingest, unify, and make sense of real-time behavioral data and enable their team to easily create new campaigns, segments, and more without relying on engineering was essential to making the team more productive.

This also made delivering more relevant, continuous experiences throughout the customer lifecycle effortless as real-time data powered more personalized experiences filled with timely, 1:1 content and recommendations — at key moments of the ring buyer’s journey.

• Blueshift’s Single Customer View was essential to enhance 1:1 personalization. These profiles are based on a rich customer history (as well as real-time insights).
• Using the profiles, Advanced Segments then allowed James Allen to get granular based on search history, behaviors, affinities, and more.
• The easy to use Creative Studio finally allowed marketers to build on-brand emails on the fly while bringing in 1:1 content with our Recommendation Engine.
• Blueshift’s Journey Builder enabled the James Allen team to launch and automate key campaigns including price-drop, abandoned cart, window shopping, welcome series, win-back, post-purchase, promotional series, and more.

With Blueshift on board, James Allen could rely on a true partner that would grow and scale with their unique needs to meet customers at the perfect moment to drive action.

“We’re a dynamic and fast-moving company. We needed a solution that could keep up and scale with our team. We selected Blueshift because it enabled us to collect, track, and act upon more data than ever before and use real-time website behaviors to drive more personalized experiences. We knew Blueshift could help us achieve our business goals and objectives,” says Michal Halperon, Conversion Optimization Manager at James Allen.

Since switching to Blueshift, the James Allen team has seen incredible results. 

• Their ability to deliver personalized experiences based on affinities to certain diamond styles, band types and more has resulted in a 17% increase in website sessions. 
• The team has increased message volume by 27%, with the same amount of resources.
• All while, the team saves over 10 hours a week with Blueshift self-serve tools.

This is just the start for James Allen and Blueshift. The team is already looking to leverage Blueshift’s Audience Targeting capabilities to improve its Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns. They also plan to use Blueshift’s Predictive Scores to better target users and personalize messages.