About Italic

Italic - an online retailer that sells luxury goods without the brand names - is a brand that knows how to adapt. Constantly looking for the best path to the future, Founder and CEO Jeremy Cai is dead set on finding the most effective method of customer acquisition that doesn’t rely solely on paid media. Organic growth is the name of the game, and organic growth relies a lot on connecting with consumers via email. 

But spending on email marketing can get out of hand really fast. And this is especially true during the holiday and other peak shopping seasons, when a lot of first-party data is being captured for shoppers who may never make a purchase. Needless to say, no business wants to spend budget emailing contacts who aren’t going to convert.

The Challenge

Italic relies on a marketing strategy that involves sending a lot of emails. But this doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all, trying to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible. It means sending the right emails at the right cadence to the right cohorts of shoppers. 

At the same time, being too conservative with who makes it on the email list can mean that potential loyal shoppers are being left on the table.

There’s a delicate balance to strike here between being efficient and maximizing effectiveness. Emailing too many contacts wastes budget; emailing too few contacts leads to missed opportunity. But regularly managing email lists is an arduous task, with a lot of room for error when done manually. And since Klaviyo charges for volume, they haven’t made this easy to do on the platform.

The Solution

To remove waste from Italic’s email lists, Cai signed-up for orita’s self-service platform. The brand typically sends between 3-7M emails every month, and wanted to be sure they were spending their budget most effectively. In just a few minutes, he was able to connect the company’s Klaviyo and Stripe accounts.Nine days later, the custom model was ready. 

“Through a super easy process that didn’t even require a meeting, orita was able to remove over one-third of the contacts from our email list who hadn’t responded, visited our website or made a purchase in the last year. The platform also rescued more than 6,000 accounts our team had suppressed, but who had come back to visit the website after we stopped sending emails.”

Jeremy Cai
CEO and founder, Italic

Based on how customers interact with this specific brand, orita’s solution works behind the scenes to programmatically suppress and re-activate email accounts in Klaviyo. This accounts for seasonality, purchase cycle and many other factors. Two months of large-scale A/B testing, plus ongoing testing, refines the model to ensure the most effective ongoing email list.

The Results

Rather than reducing this number and downgrading their Klaviyo plan, CEO Jeremy Cai decided the better strategy would be to reallocate that part of the budget to more engaged profiles. One loyal customer is worth more than 20 who are on the fence.

• over 23,000,000 fewer emails sent

• 30%+ improvement to click rate

• Sender score > 80

“You might roll your eyes at the idea of adding another monthly business subscription to your already too-long list. But this level of programmatic list optimization isn’t available anywhere else . . . this is a solution your brand wants to look at.”

Jeremy Cai
CEO and founder, Italic

There were also nearly 20,000 spam, bot and duplicate accounts that were permanently removed from the list, more than enough to pay for the cost of orita.