Piglet in bed, a digital-first, eco-friendly bedwear and linen retailer, has invested in personalised marketing and email management as it looks to drive further growth.
Partnering with Wunderkind, the bedding brand is looking to increase email-attributed revenue, grow its addressable marketing lists, and introduce sophisticated automation to its email engagement to improve customer experience (CX) throughout the buying journey.
Founded in 2017, Piglet in bed was the brainchild of founder Jessica Hanley, who set up the business in her mother’s garden shed, with a vision to create high-quality homewares that would be as cosy as they were beautiful.
Fast-forward four years and Piglet in bed has become an established name in the world of quality and sustainable linen bedding and sleepwear and has become the go-to choice for natural comfort, providing consumers with environmentally responsible, elegant products for their homes.
Piglet in bed’s fast-growth journey has been impressive, having accelerated its Direct To Consumer (D2C) operations quickly in both the US and the UK, as well as launching a pop-up shop in London’s trendy Notting Hill. But this rapid expansion and growth trajectory brought with it natural challenges.
Despite seeing positive results from a combination of marketing tactics, including email, PR, paid social ads and the leveraging of customer reviews, Piglet in bed recognised that in order to scale sustainably, it needed to introduce a more sophisticated and powerful email automation journey.
It also sought to build upon growing demand for homeware and sleepwear, which had been fuelled by the pandemic: in the first two months of lockdown, consumer demand for pyjamas increased 195% year-on-year, while sleepwear and luxury bedding rose by 125% and 110% respectively over the same period.
Piglet in bed wanted to take advantage of the increased consumer interest and traffic levels to its site by leveraging email to drive a greater proportion of its digital revenues. However, it was struggling to get above a 10% plateau using its ESP (Email Service Provider) solution alone. Piglet in bed engaged Wunderkind, recognising its credentials as a specialist technology partner with best practice expertise in email capture, personalisation and automation.
Piglet in bed has long understood the value of owning its audience, but prior to working with Wunderkind, two of its key challenges were maximising consumer data capture and using this data in the right way once collected.
Working with Wunderkind, Piglet in bed is now able to capture consumer information at various on-site touchpoints, at different stages of intent, and via an array of prompts, and then send triggered email and text message communications based on a customer’s browsing behaviour. The customer benefits from highly relevant, personalised product updates, while Piglet in bed can grow its owned database at pace and scale, and better segment its audience.
Jake Newbould, CMO at Piglet in bed, explains: “Owning an audience is far more valuable than renting one – owned audiences are critical for future growth. Being able to directly engage with consumers is powerful and will only become more so as third-party cookies will inevitably be phased out. Now, not only can we ensure consumers receive content and offers that align with their preferences, but we feel somewhat less reliant on excessive digital retargeting expenditure with the likes of Google and Facebook when their auction prices can experience such volatility. This is preferable from both a cost management and customer engagement perspective. We’ve opened the floodgates to more consumers, we’re bringing in more revenue, and we’re doing it while building an audience for the future.”
Piglet in bed has grown its addressable database significantly, capturing 5x more email addresses using the Wunderkind solution, while triggered email now accounts for 14.1% of the brand’s total digital revenue.
Danielle Auerbach, Senior VP of Customer Success at Wunderkind, adds: “Owned channel optimisation is especially important for fast-growing, digitally native brands such as Piglet in bed. With more and more shoppers taking their buying and browsing journeys online, digital competition has intensified, and the cost of ‘renting’ customers through biddable acquisition channels has ballooned exponentially. Forward-thinking marketers are now recognising the need to invest in growing and nurturing their loyal customers of the future by building their own audiences, quickly and at scale, and optimising engagement to those audiences through enhanced personalisation.”
