Artfinder Controls for Apple iOS Changes With Bloomreach Engagement and Increases Email Open Rate by 17%

Story Behind the Brand

Artfinder is the art marketplace that connects artists with art lovers, and is on a mission to make art sustainable, accessible, affordable, and a joy to discover, all while supporting artists to make a living doing what they love. It exists to challenge the industry and offer a fair and sustainable marketplace for artists.

Artfinder is using crowdcube to recruit investors and raise funds for future business endeavors. The company has sold over 240,000 works of art to over 90,000 customers in its history. Revenue has gone up 140% over the past two years, while average order value has spiked 21% in that same timeframe. Artfinder is a certified B corporation and living wage employer that has planted over 120,000+ trees. Learn more.

increase in email open rate amongst non-Apple iOS users

increase in overall email revenue when comparing April 2022 to March 2022

Challenge

Apple announced new privacy-focused features for Apple Mail that impacted the way that many companies did business. In particular, this affected key areas such as targeting, personalizing, and evaluating emails.

The privacy-focused opt-in stops senders from using pixels to collect information about users. It also prevents senders from knowing when users open an email and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or be used to determine their location.

Great for user privacy, but not so great for companies relying on email marketing.

Solution

Bloomreach Engagement and the Bloomreach email deliverability team helped Artfinder solve for Apple’s privacy changes and increase key email metrics through strategic segmentation and targeting.

To combat Apple’s privacy changes and guard against “false opens” bogging down metrics, Artfinder segmented out any user that the privacy changes would apply to. The open rate among users not impacted by the privacy changes now represents the company’s true open performance.

Taking segmentation to another level, Artfinder worked with the Bloomreach email deliverability team to more appropriately segment customers into active, lapsing, lapsed, and inactive groups. How Bloomreach defines these groups is slightly different from Artfinder’s previous provider and has helped the company improve its effectiveness with each segment.

Artfinder has a longer purchase cycle than many digital commerce companies, as customers are not buying artwork nearly as often as they purchase clothes or groceries online. The temptation with a longer sales cycle is to not consider customers lapsing or lapsed for over six months since the sales cycle is naturally longer.

Artfinder has found that resegmenting these customers after three or four months and having a more engaged active segment has generated much better email metrics without harming overall email revenue.

One of the reasons we chose Bloomreach Engagement is the flexibility and the amount of custom use cases that were available to us. We’re able to much better segment and target new and active customers, and we’ve seen much better results with email metrics.

Jane Verity

Senior Marketing Manager, Artfinder

Results

Rather than continuing to use multiple different pieces of marketing technology, Bloomreach Engagement helped Artfinder unify its customer data with a single solution. It replaced existing email marketing and CRM tools, as well as existing legacy pieces, so Artfinder could see all of its customers within a single customer view.

Making the switch to Bloomreach Engagement helped Artfinder improve two key metrics — email open rate among non-Apple iOS users and overall revenue generated from email. Artfinder increased its email open rate 17% (from 13% to 30%) thanks to a new email deliverability strategy from Bloomreach.

Additionally, personalized product recommendations contributed to an increase of 18% in email revenue (when comparing April 2022 to March 2022).

“We got our segments into a much better place with the help of the Bloomreach email deliverability team,” Jane said. “We’re talking to more engaged customers and that’s why our metrics have improved.”

Image credits: Louise Forster-Smith & Vé Boisvert | Artfinder