Think Summit 2022: How At Home Skyrocketed Their Customer Engagement

Walking into At Home is a slice of décor heaven for home improvers. Warehouse-style and bursting with variety, this one-stop-shop is all customers need to unleash their inner interior designer.

For At Home, keeping things fresh is essential. With seasonally updated merchandise and a core customer base of “restless refreshers” who are always giving their place a small tweak, relevant content is a necessity for the marketing team’s digital presence. At Home wanted to deliver efficient, best-in-class messaging even with a small team—and that’s where they found the magic of automation and personalization with Movable Ink. 

This past June, At Home took to the Think Summit stage in NYC to share their story of how they boosted customer engagement and made every message feel like a welcome home. Here’s a snapshot of what Ben Gilbert, Director of Marketing Technology, had to say:

Automate Hitting the Refresh Button

Every home refresh calls for up-to-date product recommendations and personalized messaging that inspires the perfect finishing touch. In every journey email, At Home does just that and transforms a typical static SKU into a dynamic product grid formulated from customers’ latest preferences and behaviors.

Using Movable Ink’s tracking pixel, At Home pulls in top-trending SKUs from their website’s current product feed instead of relying on the predictions from merchandising teams, resulting in a 24% increase in CTR without lifting a finger.  

At Home decided to take the success of Movable Ink-powered SKUs and apply it to one of their rare coupon events: the birthday series. With this winning duo, the team experienced a 35% increase in CTR, along with an 18% lift in birthday campaigns alone. At Home ultimately emphasized the value created by the rare coupon, which was a big reason for the increased conversion rates.

Product carousels that render beautifully on every screen via Movable Ink’s device targeting is another winning set-it-and-forget-it feature. By using several carousels in one message, At Home generates a gamified “mix and match” experience where customers can customize their perfect product. Here, customers create their own perfect lamp from personally recommended stand and shade options.

At Home marketers even transformed the rare batch-send into a fun, gamified experience that drives engagement. With Movable Ink’s scratch-off animation, this fall lookbook just got more exciting. What began as a standard message became a blockbuster email, garnering the second most engagement in At Home’s entire quarter.

Let Customers Speak for Themselves

Who has the inside scoop on what customers want? Customers themselves. 

At Home knows this and ensures that customers’ most-visited categories are showcased in their messaging. Using Movable Ink, dynamic icons always display the season’s most popular categories based on current website data. 

At Home saw a 35% lift in CTR without their team needing to produce a single creative refresh. It’s time to forgo the guessing game and serve up the content customers have already shown they love—all with greater ease through Movable Ink’s automation.

Word-of-mouth is one of the most powerful product testaments, with 74% of consumers identifying peer validation as a critical factor in their purchasing decisions. 

At Home applied this to their dynamic content blocks by spotlighting positive product reviews and pairing them with items customers may find interesting based on their previous behaviors. By pairing high-interest items with social proofing, At Home saw a 19% increase in product clicks. 

They say a picture is worth a thousand words—or in this case, infinite incremental clicks. At Home took the success of social proofing and included the most popular visual content that was already being generated by satisfied users (UGC) to create content blocks. With Movable Ink’s auto-refreshing capabilities, At Home turned this campaign into an evergreen footer for all of their trigger emails, driving click-through engagement for the product pages of these rave-review items.

Screen to Store Messaging

Digital engagement is just the beginning. With the ultimate goal of driving foot-traffic to their brick-and-mortar locations, At Home generates messaging that acts as a critical connector from screen to store. 

In an evergreen footer at the bottom of their emails, At Home ensures that the transition from digital to in-person shopping is smooth and effortless. By connecting Movable Ink with their location marketing tool, customers’ favorite store is always ready to welcome them.

Take a look at At Home’s recent Grand Opening event. In the top banner of the email, a countdown timer to opening day maintains relevancy and drives urgency. A first-name personalization message overlays a picture of the store location, followed by a map that features the customer’s nearest store, using  geo-based personalization. 

To drive further engagement, a contest for At Home Insiders is displayed with a call-to-action (CTA) to “Learn More” and visit the store details page. While these features alone garnered a 20% lift from the previous year’s template,  At Home decided to take things a step further. 

Instead of a static “Learn More” button that links to a store details page, At Home subbed the link for a “Save the Date” CTA that allows customers to add the event to their calendars. With this change alone, At Home saw a staggering 328% lift in total clicks, creating an unstoppable email.

Using Movable Ink as a helping hand, At Home is empowered to create best-in-class campaigns with undeniable results. Theirs is just one story of many; hear from other show-stopping brands who took to the Think Summit stage and shared how they’ve taken their campaigns, customers, and ultimately revenue to the next level.