wunderkind

T.R. Wilhoit

VP, E-commerce, Case-Mate

Discover the insider secrets of Case-Mate, a leading mobile accessories company, as they share their remarkable journey to success in the fiercely competitive market. In this exclusive interview, T.R. Wilholt, VP, E-commerce, Case-Mate, delves deep into their strategies, challenges, and triumphs. Learn how Case-Mate uses cutting-edge techniques, including targeted SMS marketing, to engage their diverse customer base spanning from fashion enthusiasts to outdoor adventurers. Dive into the world of product launches, exploring the pivotal role of MMS and SMS in driving excitement and conversions.


Wunderkind Success Story: Case-Mate

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Success Stories is our catalog of videos from our clients sharing the successes they are seeing with their partnership with Wunderkind. Wunderkind is the leading AI-driven performance marketing solution that collects consent based, first-party data and identifies anonymous traffic for brands in order to scale hyperpersonalized one-to-one messages. Brands lean on the Wunderkind Identity Network,&nbsp;a proprietary database recognizing 9 billion devices, 1 billion opted-in consumers and&nbsp;observes 2 trillion digital transactions per year, to trigger the most impactful offers to&nbsp;their target audience at the right moment and in the right channel. This proprietary data is&nbsp;accessed by Wunderkind’s Autonomous Marketing Platform, and AI engine which integrates seamlessly into a brands’ existing ESP to boost performance across email, text and advertising channels. Wunderkind is the only performance solution that guarantees a lift in revenue for its clients and delivers over $5 billion in directly attributable revenue annually for brands across a&nbsp;number of industries, often ranking as a top 3 revenue channel in clients’ own analytics&nbsp;platforms. Brands such as Harley-Davidson, Perry Ellis and Shoe Carnival partner with&nbsp;Wunderkind to drive top-line revenue through its guaranteed results

wunderkind Success Stories

Abandoned Cart Emails: 5 Ways To Win Back Your Customers This BFCM

T.R. Wilhoit: I am T.R. Wilhoit. I work for Case- Mate and I oversee all of our e- commerce, which includes Amazon direct to consumer and our other marketplaces online. What's our brand's mission? To make great products. That's pretty much it. Aside from that, I mean, we have a good time. Our customers, it's kind of a mix. So our customers, we operate in a lot of different product segments. Our core customer is definitely more female fashion oriented, leaning female in a lot of ways with kind of the trends and things like that. But we have a myriad of brands where they kind of focus on different areas. We have more rugged brands and outdoorsy products. We also have more general mass market products that kind of fit across a larger segment online. But the core of our business has always been more fashion oriented and something that's more trend forward, especially in the mobile category. I mean, the biggest thing is we're a mobile case company from the start. Now we make a lot of other products that aren't just cases, but being a mobile company, text makes so much sense. I mean, when I started working with Case- Mate, we were looking at 70% of our traffic is mobile, but now it's 90 plus percent. It's just gone up every year. So it just makes total sense that I'm already on my phone, text, email, primarily on mobile engagement. Other than us business people, we're checking on our desktops, and most people don't check their email on their desktop. So email and text has been a huge part of our growth strategy from the customer side, but also we knew it was a big revenue center for us. We have a high acquisition cost business typically. People don't come back as often. Loyalty is not a huge component to our business. Retention can be tough, but if we can get value out of the first sale, the easiest way to do that is to have email and text in some capacity. I mean, it's our number two or number three channel every month. When you look at the full year, especially for direct to consumer channels, text is going to be up there at the top. It's a huge part of our product launch strategy. Text is the main thing we think about when we launch a product. We have email and text are kind of the combined forces, but for new products, it is the primary way that we get the word out. Advertising is kind of secondary to that for us because we don't have a ton of products that can get a ton of ad support and be healthy that way. We operate mostly in a demand driven segment, so if there's existing demand, we want to be there, and we do operate like Google Ads and things like that, but text, we can provide the most value in text. The cost seems right for us and the highest conversion rate we get is from text. It's not going to be from any other channel for us. Well, we've grown our text list from zero to over 200 K and it's still growing. So for text, that's huge. People willing to give their phone number to us is a big deal, I think, and we think that's always going to pay dividends in the future. Email wise, we've added hundreds of thousands of email subscribers with Wunderkind as well, which has just bolstered our list especially around fall for us. September through December, we call it a Super Bowl for us, is the Apple launch, especially for mobile cases so it's a huge part of our strategies to get some of those new people in and convert them and grow the list up to Black Friday. This year, we've been getting back into social advertising in a bigger way, TikTok and Facebook being a big part of our media spend. For our media spend in the past, Google was our biggest channel. We spent the most money there, and a lot of our Google spend drove our text email signup. What we're seeing now is we split our budget with social advertising. We're adding TikTok on this year, which obviously we're a little late, but it's still difficult to get that up and running for some companies, but we're seeing a pretty even split of new text and email subscribers in our Wunderkind flows from both social and Google. So by splitting that, we're actually seeing real growth in our business for the first time since early 2022 when I think a lot of companies the last year have seen some sagging on their direct to consumer side. And we've seen that too in some capacity but we're kind of seeing everything pan out in a way where we're going to see a huge growth, I think by end of year, especially across all of our different channels. So really for us it's email and text are the most important things. We're launching products every week or every two weeks in some capacity, whether it's a case or an accessory or some sort of beach product, which we've done a lot of this year. Those are the two first things we think about. And then for big promo periods, e- commerce promos, that's where Wunderkind comes in and we can do a special text or a special onsite banner or something like that. This can all tie everything together, so all of our channels are really working together as one. Well, really, I'm switching it away from Google, so I'm giving Google less money now. We are going to be testing more Wunderkind ad products. We've kind of redid our creative approach this year, and I think that's helping us a ton, rebranded, got some new energy I think with our brands. We've added a couple additional brands to our portfolio that's going to be huge for us, and I think it's going to create some new opportunities to acquire customers. I'd say we're pretty similar to what we've been. I still think that our emphasis is on text for our company. Mobile is just, I think we're going to see 99% of our traffic from mobile at some point. It just keeps going up every year. I mean, really the growth from text, when you start from zero in text, what will blow your mind is how fast you can grow in text. And obviously there's points where things can slow down a bit, and there was some boom during Covid, but even before that, I mean email had already started kicking off in a huge way. And the ROI was there from the beginning with email. Adding text on, yes, we did see a balloon in subscribers during Covid, but even post Covid text is just as important now as it was two years ago, three years ago for us. But yeah, if you're not doing text right now, what will blow your mind is how fast text will grow when customers see that you have that capability. Yeah, our seasonality. So when looking at Black Friday and preparing for that, our seasonality is different than a lot of companies. I mean, we deal with, unfortunately, we're still pretty tethered to Apple's launch schedule. If Apple launches a new phone in September, that's likely to kick off our busy season online. At least that back half of September is pretty huge. And from an acquisition perspective, that really builds us towards Black Friday. From a company perspective, we've been preparing from the R& D side, building products that go along with phone cases and our additional products. So a big part of our strategy going into Black Friday this year and what we've been preparing is actually marketing things that aren't just a phone case for us that actually go with a phone case. And we've already started the process and talking with especially our Wunderkind team about getting our campaigns ready onsite for Black Friday. We're already thinking about that. We're prepping campaigns for the iPhone launch, and we're already going to build that into, okay, what do we do for Black Friday and how would we marry those things together? This year I think Black Friday, Saturday, Monday is, again, it's value based. I think customers want the best deal they can find. There's still some triggers out there like expedited shipping and things that people are looking for that they can get something fast, especially from brands they love. I think more than ever though, people will do a lot of Christmas shopping on Black Friday when they can get the best deal versus last minute shopping. I think Black Friday has been the one thing, retail, I think there's been ups and downs on Black Friday, and you have the Thursdays that a lot of companies aren't doing Thursday anymore, which is probably a good thing for the employees. But more than ever, I think Black Friday continues to grow online every year because more and more people don't want to wait to have to go to a store or do something in December when they get paid less during that time period. The biggest thing for us right now, we're trying to attract new customers with Facebook and TikTok ads or Meta, whatever you want to call it, Meta ads, Facebook, Instagram, and then TikTok, getting new people in. That's kind of our biggest acquisition channels right now. So many advertisers that have abandoned that. But I think if you look at some of the brands in the more the fashion categories, we all know... And a lot of people, if you really think about it, if you're an Instagram user, how many things have you bought off Instagram and you didn't even think about it. And" Oh, the attribution wasn't there," and all the marketers get into the attribution discussions. Well, no, people are still on Instagram and actually a lot of advertisers left so there's a lot of opportunity. So for new ways to acquire customers, mainly for us as social advertising, but we always view our text audience as our VIPs anyway, so for acquisition and for kind of a retention strategy for us, we don't necessarily operate a distinct loyalty program, but we do talk to our text audience as VIPs. If you want to be a loyal Case- Mate fan, you're in our text program, and then you get the best offers, the best deals, the best pricing, and you know when products launch immediately. So our brand has a super fast customer lifecycle, typically. If you think about it from first touch to purchase, oftentimes for us, if it's a phone case, it's same day. With our newer products we've kind of extended that lifespan now where it could be a few days with our Facebook advertising and things like that, along with other channels that aren't just direct to consumer, Amazon and other places people like to buy. We do see that attribution happening a good bit from text, especially. We know that we launch a new product on text or email we're going to see a bump in a lot of other channels, which is nice. The journey often happens for us within, it's one day, it's three days, or it's 12 days, and that's it. So we don't have a ton of opportunity to re- target people, which is, from a marketer perspective, it's frustrating. Because you're like, I should be able to use everything that every marketer gets to use. But what it makes us have to think about is what's our intent? How good does our copy have to be on our text? How good does our creative have to be when we send an MMS or something? It needs to be that much better because we need to get that immediate eye- catching attention grabbing thing for the new product that we're launching. So MMS and SMS, the differences for us, honestly, some of it's cost balancing. For us it does cost more to send MMS, but a lot of times MMS can be more impactful, especially for a product launch. Sometimes we like to show something. If it's something that's brand new, sometimes an SMS for us can tease that new product and get a really high click- through rate. But a lot of times for big promos, MMS can be really powerful because we can put the promo code or something right in the graphic. We know that not everyone's going to click, but we know we're going to get that attribution because they open the text. And for us, it's kind of a balancing act. Most of our MMS traffic is for new products. For SMS, we're pretty consistent, a lot of automated things happening. We have the welcome offer, we've got other things happening throughout the week, back in stock, whatever it might be, which is really nice. But MMS, we're starting to do more and more of it because launching so many unique products and it's super helpful to show the customer something cool or interesting. Ties into your other marketing channels is nice so you don't just have this text- based subject line thing happening with your new products. You want to kind of show off. All this effort and money you spend on this new creative you have a cool way to show it off, which I think is great. So brand format is the biggest thing for us in text, it's a bit of both. For us, I talk about our mission is making great products. The product is as much the brand as the brand is the product. For us, it's all about the product has to be great, it has to look great, it's got to make sense immediately when you see it, what that's for, how to use it, or that's for me or it's not for me, right away. So for us, it's a bit of a balancing act. For MMS, I think you definitely get across more of that brand centric creative approach, whereas SMS, with the different segmentation you can do and the different audiences and more engagement focused things, it's more about offering value to a customer that may have lapsed, or a customer that just joined but hasn't bought yet. There's a lot of different ways to get into that with text, and I think text is a great way to get someone to make their first purchase. MMS is something that can drive home like, oh yeah, I like this brand and I like their products.