Alembika discovers a new customer persona, boosts Average Order Value by 8% and drives 11% revenue growth

One of the biggest challenges for a new business? You don’t know what you don’t know.

Luxury women’s fashion brand, Alembika, entered the market knowing what their timeless, chic, and comfortable 50+ women’s clothing line could offer the world, while maintaining a gracious, open mind of what else they could learn along the way.

Armed with a perfect symphony of a tech stack – including Klaviyo, Shopify, Attentive, and Yotpo – the team at Alembika came to Lexer for the same, crucial reason many do: a desire to truly understand their audience, improve customer communication, and cater to their needs. 

This process – uncovering a hidden but powerful customer – offered more than they bargained for.

The challenge: the squeakiest wheel isn’t the only wheel

Early attempts to understand Alembika’s customers through social media comments and email responses began to create more questions than answers. 

Their best-in-class tech stack offered them more data than ever before, but a limited ability to interpret it. 

Debates around “How old is she? What’s her stage of life?” continued to pop up around Alembika headquarters, distorted by a minority of customers the team was hearing from, the majority of the time. Internally, the jury was out. 

“You’ll have a vocal group of 20 people but that might not reflect your true sample. It skews your perception of who your customer really is,” Elisha Reisser, US Success Director, Lexer explains. 

Recognizing this challenge, in addition to a need to unify customer data across channels and glean holistic insights, Alembika’s marketing automation platform, Klaviyo, recommended they try Lexer. 

“Klaviyo’s recommendation was superb. [Lexer] quickly passed the technical integration test across our full tech stack - Klaviyo, Attentive, Shopify - and we were soon on our way to insights," Alin Wagner, Head of Marketing & eCommerce at Alembika shared on the first steps into their new world of insights. 

The solution: data-driven insights and instant application

Lexer’s impact was immediate. “We’ve always known that our Essentials Collection was important, but when we looked at the data coming from Lexer and saw our Punto Pants were most popular 30% of the time, seeing this in black and white, changed the way we developed promotions on our website,“ explained Alin.

The team quickly actioned all of the out-of-the-box insights, optimizing email sequences, hyper-targeting paid social advertising, and automating one-time buyer conversion strategies. However, the biggest, most unexpected discovery came from utilizing Lexer’s native integration with Experian’s Mosaic segmentation. 

Mosaic is a rich set of customer data that segments consumers based on their geography, demographics, socioeconomic status, household dynamics, and 300 more data points. Lexer's exclusive Experian partnership allows for all customer data enrichment to happen natively within Lexer, securely in AWS, meaning no customer data is ever shared with third parties.

With Mosaic added to their CDXP, Alembika could identify which of the Mosaic ‘types’ their customers belonged to, explore the most relevant groups, where they over-index, and understand who they are outside of their relationship with the brand.

This uncovered an important, highly valuable audience that was yet to be noticed. They were loyal, they were lucrative, but they were quiet and completely hidden until brought to life within the CDXP.

“Their needs, habits, way of life, made us change our strategy and pushed us to put more emphasis on them. It completely changed WHO we are talking to – and it did so for the better," Alin emphasized.

The result: a whole new customer persona opens up a new world of opportunity

The newly discovered Alembika woman wasn’t as active on social media – frankly, she was too busy for that – but she loved their product and kept coming back. Leaving behind prior assumptions, Alin and the team evolved their language and storytelling from solely a ‘retirement lifestyle’ persona to a second type, describing ‘day-to-night styles for the busy woman’.  

That’s the cherry on top: they didn’t have to choose just one. Powered through a tech stack primed for personalization and segmentation, Alembika continued to speak directly to their older customer base, while simultaneously fostering a new, and equally personalized, relationship with their ‘powerful middle aged women’ through tailored communication. 

"We have shifted our approach towards much deeper segmentation to cater to an audience we  hadn’t seen or heard from before, but now are invested heavily in," Alin explained. 

In terms of results, the investment in this insights investigation and subsequent shift in strategy definitely paid off. In their first year with Lexer: 

• Customer growth increased by 140%
• Customers exhibited higher shopping frequency, resulting in an average order increase of 6% per customer
• Order value increased by 8% year-over-year, resulting in a 11% revenue increase. 

Through the effective utilization of Lexer's data-driven solutions, Alembika experienced improved customer retention, higher conversion rates, and greater customer satisfaction. This journey of discovery, insight and adoption allowed Alembika to truly understand their audience and what resonates with them, leading to remarkable results.

Interested in learning more about how Lexer can help you understand– and grow – your customers using data? Book a demo today.