Leading Sessions From Salesforce Connections
Another Salesforce Connections has come and gone, and the 2024 edition was one for the books. From marketers tearing up their calendars to hands-on workshops, the conference was all about rethinking current tactics for today’s customers and market needs.
But out of the hundreds of expert-led sessions and breakouts, Victoria’s Secret and United Airlines’ visionary stories truly stood out among the rest. Through their partnership with Movable Ink, the two brands transformed their business-as-usual programs into something truly extraordinary.
Victoria’s Secret’s AI-Personalized Batch Emails
Not too long ago, Victoria’s Secret was dealing with the same issues that plague virtually every marketing team: manual segmentation and testing, shrinking email engagement, and messaging that put the brand at the center—rather than the customer.
The team was well aware of the issues, but fixing them was easier said than done. Batch campaigns are the backbone of any marketing calendar, and personalizing thousands of emails is impossible through manual effort alone. Victoria’s Secret needed an automated approach, powered by AI.
The iconic apparel brand’s first step towards a personalized batch program meant decoupling campaigns from creative assets. For example, instead of building a campaign from scratch using one-and-done creatives, Victoria’s Secret decided to rethink their approach:
For every campaign a marketer schedules, they can choose from various templates for that particular send. From there, the AI uses the marketer’s creative library to automatically select the content that is most likely to resonate with that particular customer, and with every campaign, the marketer can place specific rules and guardrails to control the messaging output. You can see this transformation in action through this in-market campaign.
Victoria’s Secret’s original approach to batch their program looked like the campaign below—sending a single message to their entire email file. While this was relevant to some customers, it certainly wasn’t a one-size-fits-all campaign.
Today, Victoria’s Secret batch emails fuel their business with far more nuance. While everyone still receives an email covering the same topic, the copy and the creative are all fine-tuned to each customer’s affinities.
Not only does this automated content decisioning boost customer engagement, it also drives incredible efficiency gains for Victoria’s Secret. By selecting various content for each customer, every piece of content gets greater exposure with customers over the asset’s lifetime, ultimately giving them more bang for their buck with each costly creative.
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