Campaigns Boost Hallmark Baby Email Acquisition

Like the age group Hallmark Baby caters to, the company is itself in its infant stage in the retail industry as a relatively new business. The company designs and creates children’s clothing, as well as personalized gifts, for the moment they are born to the age of eight; clothing that is as full of creativity as the kids who wear them.

The Ask

Being the most recent Hallmark company, Hallmark Baby was looking to acquire and grow its subscriber base to help spread the word of its products. The company had begun this process by sending emails to subscribers of the Hallmark parent company, as well as driving customers to subscribe using a website homepage pop-up and landing page for email opt-ins. When DEG, a full-service digital agency and one of the largest Salesforce Marketing Cloud partners in the country, partnered with Hallmark Baby and migrated its email program to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Hallmark Baby asked DEG to develop a new solution for continuing the process of increasing its subscriber list.

The Answer

Using HubExchange – Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s app marketplace – DEG partnered with PadiAct to create a number of campaign ads designed to capture names and email addresses from Hallmark Baby’s website traffic. These campaigns, which included a Lightbox form integration, collected customer information from social platforms, like Facebook and Pinterest, and also traffic from general direct and organic sources. By developing individual campaigns, DEG was able to more sophisticatedly target Hallmark Baby’s online customers, which also allowed for easier reporting on the back end. In addition to the campaigns, DEG bolstered Hallmark Baby’s previous landing page, providing strategic recommendation regarding homepage placement, leveraging it for targeted Facebook acquisition traffic, and driving future Hallmark campaign recipients to the page, which provides a cleaner capture and reporting process. The subscribers who came from Hallmark and not the general opt-in channels received a specific welcome email to build engagement.

The Results

DEG utilized its deep email expertise to develop a more refined strategic process for targeting potential Hallmark Baby subscribers across a number of platforms. Since DEG implemented its acquisition efforts, Hallmark Baby’s subscriber base has grown by 18 percent. Approximately half of both lightbox and landing page subscribers were driven from social channels. Using this data, DEG’s email team collaborated with the agency’s social and paid media teams to optimize both social and paid placements, which maximized the number of email subscribers coming from social media. DEG’s deep understanding of its client’s customers allowed Hallmark Baby to connect its messages to a greater audience, growing the number of fans of its creative children’s clothing.