Earning the number two ranking for Fast Growing Home websites in 2020, retailer Rugs.com is experiencing rapid growth. Headquartered in Fort Mill, South Carolina, the company ships tens of thousands of rugs worldwide every month. In the face of an increasingly competitive online market for home goods, Rugs.com needed to improve its personalization efforts to deliver a differentiated customer experience.
The team knew that this would require connecting its customer data across its brands and many systems to better identify and target shoppers. Rugs.com turned to Twilio Segment to seamlessly connect its data and send valuable shopper audiences to downstream marketing and ad platforms, which improved return on ad spend and contributed to unprecedented 400% YoY growth.
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Setting the foundation with centralized first-party data across all brands and channels
Rugs.com not only has volumes of data across its own properties and tools, but the company also owns multiple brands around the globe. In order to design more intelligent experiences, the company wanted to leverage insights from customer data across all of its e-commerce properties.
However, Rugs.com did not have an effective way to collect, manage, and activate its own system’s data, let alone from other brand lines. As Grayson Bagwell, Director of Business Development and E-commerce at Rugs.com, explains, “One of our largest problems is that we have so much information and so many things that are occurring on our sites, and we didn’t have a great place or way to distribute that information.”
Before Twilio Segment, valuable internal engineering resources were required to bring first-party data together from different sources and standardize it for teams, creating roadblocks for marketing initiatives and preventing growth.
With Twilio Segment as its Customer Data Platform, the Rugs.com team now connects disparate data sources across websites, payment processing tools, and various marketing and analytics tools. From there, the team leverages its valuable first-party data to build highly robust, unified customer profiles.
Now, Rugs.com is able to easily create highly differentiated audience Twilio Segments based on advanced behavioral data across all of its brands, directly from Twilio Engage's (formerly known as Personas) interface.
Designing personalized Journeys across the marketing stack
Once the Rugs.com team was confident in their first-party customer data, they were ready to personalize their customer messaging. Rather than wait for engineering resources to support new campaigns, the marketing team can now build personalized experiences in Twilio Engage on the fly.
Bringing together tools across its owned and paid channels, Rugs.com leverages Twilio Engage to design true omni-channel experiences through Braze, Intercom, and advertising platforms like Google Adwords and Facebook.
With Journeys, the team builds multi-step, cross-channel campaigns to drive repeat purchases and customer lifetime value. For example, based on the rug size of any given purchase, Rugs.com now delivers a personalized campaign to encourage customers to purchase another rug size to complement their collection.
"The ideal future state is targeting our customers with relevant products, as opposed to generic blasts of news or updates,” Grayson explains. “It’s actually personalizing and customizing their experience wherever they are, and with Twilio Segment Journeys, we’re delivering cross-channel engagement like never before.”
Driving growth while improving return on ad spend with real-time audience & suppression lists
By unifying its paid media strategy with its owned communication channels of email and live chat, Rugs.com saw marked improvement in ad efficacy using Twilio Engage.
Leveraging its most important advertising platforms, Rugs.com automatically syncs its audiences to Twilio Segment’s native integrations with Google and Facebook to ensure ads are personalized and targeted to the right people with the right promotions and products.
“Most of our spend goes directly to advertising, so the ability to get audiences and events based on first-party data into those platforms is a big deal,” says Bagwell. “The fact that we can coordinate our advertising and email campaigns together in one place with Journeys is critical to delivering a customer experience that stands out.”
As one example, Rugs.com sends high-intent shopper audiences, such as users who have viewed a specific category of rugs, directly from Twilio Engage to Facebook Custom Audiences for retargeting on Facebook and Instagram. This audience, in parallel with a real-time suppression list built in Twilio Engage of purchasers, enables Rugs.com to effectively move more users down the funnel, ultimately generating higher return on ad spend and growth.
Real-time suppression audience: Users who have completed order
According to Grayson, “Twilio Segment’s first-party audience targeting capabilities directly improved our return on ad spend. With better performing Google and Facebook campaigns, we were not only able to generate more revenue, but we were able to reinvest part of our optimized ad budgets into other high growth initiatives. This helped achieve 400% YoY growth.”
What’s next? Email, ads, and live chat were only the start to unifying strategies and achieving true omnichannel personalization for Rugs.com. The company plans to add more sources and destinations, like Algolia for search, and their new Rugs.com iOS app once it launches. For every new tool added to their stack, Rugs.com plans to integrate them into their Journeys to execute more meaningful omnichannel personalization across its digital experience.
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