After a six-month test-and-learn approach to SMS marketing, Alo Yoga is using its learnings to power its 2024 acquisition and retention strategies.
“SMS now represents 4% of our total business revenue,” said Cher Fuller, senior director of digital marketing at Alo Yoga. “There’s a ton of growth potential for revenue, but also as an acquisition channel surpassing, or getting on par with, our email program.”
Fuller credits SMS marketing’s nimbleness: Where emails require hours of work done by a creative using original imagery and graphics, for a text, Fuller is able to create a marketing segment and bespoke landing page, and provide a link to Alo’s [marketing] team in under five minutes, she said. SMS messages from Alo include intro discount offers and teasers for new campaigns, for example.
Fuller joined Alo in June 2023 and, soon after, launched SMS text messaging for the brand through Attentive. This was Alo’s first time experimenting with text message marketing. Fuller told Glossy she found success with SMS messaging in previous marketing and strategy roles at Nike, Forever21 and PLBY Group.
“The first findings were that Alo’s younger shoppers prefer SMS and don’t really check their emails,” said Fuller. “The second [top converting] segment on text was [Alo] Loyalty Program members who want early access [to new color drops].”
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Alo has a multi-prong approach to acquiring new phone numbers. For new digital shoppers, this includes offering 15% off a first purchase of full-price goods. “The idea of getting a discount always influences behavior pretty fiercely,” Fuller said. Acquiring numbers from in-store shoppers, however, has proven to be the most effective strategy.
“Stores and the website have been the primary acquisition sources for us for email addresses, but this year, we want to level up how we integrate mobile acquisition,” Fuller said. To reduce friction at the cash wrap, both for the customers sharing their often long and complicated email addresses and for the cashiers collecting them, “collecting a phone number, from a unique identifier standpoint, makes way more sense,” she said.
At the start of 2023, Alo had 10 stores across the U.S. and Canada. By the end of this year, it expects that number to surpass 100 stores. That will include opening its first locations in Europe, according to Forbes.
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Alo Yoga was launched in 2007 by childhood friends Danny Harris and Marco DeGeorge and is currently privately held. It reported its first billion-dollar sales year in 2022.
Fuller’s team has tested conversion through SMS with various content. They found that Alo shoppers who come in through text almost always stick to Alo’s core collection for their first purchase, even when a bold color drop brings them to the site. For example, Fuller told Glossy that Paradise Pink — a Barbiecore-like bubblegum pink that was a top summer 2023 seller — routinely piqued the interest of new shoppers, but ultimately, it was black leggings they bought first.
“[A bright color or trendy item] may be the fun thing that brings you in, but it’s not where new customers are converting,” Fuller said. She told Glossy that first purchases are often black Airbrush Leggings, which retail for $98, or a hoodie or sweats from the brand’s bestselling Accolade collection, which go for $128 and $118, respectively.
According to new data released by Attentive this week, an average shopper is more likely to purchase something priced between $50 and $100 when shopping on their phone. The company also released findings around impulse purchasing: It found that millennials are the most likely to make frequent or occasional impulse purchases on their phones (74.4%), followed by Gen X (68.8%), Gen Z (62.8%), and Baby Boomers (53.2%). Through its internal data, Attentive also found that, generally speaking, most shoppers are more likely to make an impulse purchase in-store or on their phones than they are when shopping at their computers.
As for repeat Alo customers, new color drops had the most allure on SMS, with top fall and winter converters being styles in navy and espresso, Fuller said. “The [SMS] announcement of the holiday offerings drove our biggest revenue and traffic spike, as did [a message about our last sale’s] final hours,” Fuller said.
But perhaps the biggest learning was this: “Pre-holiday, we were A/B testing [driving SMS customers to] the homepage versus [a newly created page called] ‘New To Alo,’” Fuller said about Alo’s first text campaigns. “What we learned is the conversion rate was so much higher going to the New To Alo page, so we switched all the links [for Alo’s holiday marketing].”
Compared to the brand’s homepage, which changes daily and features campaigns and new launches, the New To Alo page is designed to be minimal, welcoming and simple. “It’s like, ‘Here’s where to start: Here are the things that everyone loves,’” Fuller said. “We’ve been able to identify friction and dictate that experience.”
