Lane Bryant, Vibes win 2 awards for mobile engagement

Dive Brief:

Lane Bryant won two gold awards in partnership with marketing company Vibes for a mobile engagement campaign, according to a press release. The awards were given in the "Relationship Building/CRM" and "Messaging" categories this week during the 2018 Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) North America Regional Smarties event in New York. The awards go to marketing teams and creative talent making a business impact through mobile.
Through behavioral metrics, Lane Bryant and Vibes developed omnichannel mobile marketing strategies that resulted in a click-through rate of 13% when emojis were used, a rise in mobile wallet saves as high as 37% when they used multimedia, and a conversion rate of 98% for a contest held in-store, Vibes reported on its website. Following the introduction of a mobile wallet, the average save rate was 20%.
Among the other gold MMA Smarties award winners in North America were 1-800-Flowers.com for "It's Never Too Late, Always the Perfect Gift with 1-800-Flowers" in the mobile payments/commerce category; Build.com and Prolific Interactive for "Build.com 'In-Home Preview'" in the virtual reality/augmented reality category; T-Mobile and The Marketing Store for the "Reaping Rewards with T-Mobile Tuesdays" loyalty program initiative in the promotions category; and Colgate and Red Fuse Communications won awards in multiple categories, as well as Best-in-Show for "Colgate E1: The Connected Toothbrush."

Dive Insight:

Retailers, consumer brands and other companies are getting more sophisticated in their use of mobile marketing campaigns, as demonstrated by the winners of Smarties awards recently given by the Mobile Marketing Association. This year’s honorees included Lane Bryant, the women's apparel retailer, which has 757 stores and an e-commerce operation. Lane Bryant partnered with mobile marketing firm Vibes.

Vibes sought to reinforce Lane Bryant’s long-time marketing message of female empowerment by developing a personalized, multichannel campaign with a focus on the preferences of individual customers, said the Vibes website. The program included in-store try-on events, tie-ins for donations with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and a focus on a new mobile wallet. Partially through an in-store contest that combined online and offline elements, Lane Bryant store associates helped boost the number of mobile subscribers by 30% in six months, 16% higher than other retailers, a video on the Vibes website reported.

The retailer has made "impressive" progress growing mobile programs for the company’s brands: Lane Bryant, Cacique, Catherines and Lane Bryant Outlet, said Eric Gohs, VP of marketing strategy in a press release. "Mobile plays an integral role in fostering deeper, more personal relationships with our customers, and in highlighting the benefits of visiting our stores," he said.

The omnichannel, multi-faceted campaign made use of video, which is a key to reaching consumers. According to HubSpot Research, 72% of consumers prefer video to text for receiving branded marketing information. Coresight Research has estimated a 29% compound annual growth rate for consumer internet video from 2017 to 2021. But the number of brands who are truly effective in marketing is small. Only 4%, or 94, of 2,303 brands were ranked as "genius" by Gartner L2.

Meanwhile, the plus-size retailing segment — or "women's special-size apparel," as Lane Bryant prefers — is seeing growth and attention lately. This week Walmart said it has acquired online direct-to-consumer plus-sized brand Eloquii reportedly for $100 million, or about two-and-a-half times Eloquii’s annual revenue.