Smart Glass Jewelry, an Atlanta-based small business, has staked its claim in the recycled jewelry industry while aiming to save the world one empty glass bottle at a time. The unique brand began appearing in small boutiques during the early nineties, then hit it big when Aveda placed a large order after seeing a necklace made from one of their product bottles.
In June 2006, Coca-Cola commissioned Kathleen Plate, the owner and creative mastermind behind Smart Glass Jewelry, to create a line using their signature bottles. The demand for custom Smart Glass pieces has grown from the Southeast to the East Coast and is now one of the nation’s leading eco-accessory brands with an entire line of fashion jewelry made from recycled bottles.
The Challenge
Despite its commercial accolades, Smart Glass Jewelry is one small business that’s been impacted by the disruption by an omnichannel world, resulting in an inactive email subscriber list and a decline in online orders. “Most of our marketing was done through grassroots and word-of-mouth efforts. I made the bulk of my orders and subscriber additions through wholesale and retail tradeshow events,” says Plate, “but over the past couple of years, I noticed my stack of orders grew smaller and with it my subscriber list.”
These circumstances are not unique to Smart Glass Jewelry. In fact, one of the most significant challenges facing modern marketers is identifying ways to grow their subscriber lists at an affordable cost.
The Solution
Larger retailers have been sharing anonymized data for years to augment their subscriber list, but this information hasn’t been easily accessible to small and medium-sized (SMB) retailers due to high costs and complexities. In an increasingly competitive digital landscape, there’s no denying the fact that smaller eCommerce businesses, like Smart Glass Jewelry, struggle to identify new ways to engage customers beyond their demographic and geographic reach. The good news is, with the proper
tools and resources in place, smaller online stores can now compete with larger retailers.
To better position her brand in a growing sea of online stores, Plate leveraged Springbot Exchange’s Audience Expander to supplement her subscriber list “I’m not a digital marketer by trade, but I recognized that to scale our online orders, I needed to first focus our marketing efforts on building a quality email subscriber list,” says Plate. “I knew larger retailers were utilizing customer data to reach new audiences, but I assumed those services were too costly for a business like ours.”
With the help of a dedicated Campaign Service Specialist, Plate was able to match her store’s customer data to identify look-alike audiences and launch an automated three-series email drip campaign.
The Results
Since joining the Springbot Exchange and launching Audience Expander, Smart Glass Jewelry has grown their active subscriber list by ten percent in less than three months. They’ve also achieved an engagement rate of five percent and have seen a steady growth of new online orders, up 38 percent compared to this time last year.
Interested in learning more about Smart Glass Jewelry and Kathleen’s journey towards eCommerce? Be sure to check out our Customer Journey series for more updates.
