Trendhim creates profit with a global SMS strategy
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About Trendhim
Trendhim was founded in 2008 with a vision to create a universe for men where they can find everything they need to express themselves and feel confident. Today, Trendhim primarily sells their own brands, which are known for high quality and unique designs.
With a mission to be the go-to destination for men's accessories, Trendhim currently ships over 1 million parcels a year to more than 39 global markets.
"inMobile, and especially Dorte, have been fantastic at supporting us and continuously following up on our progress. I recommend inMobile to everyone in my network if they want to get started with SMS. The other SMS providers are both more expensive and don't have as good support."
Kenneth Rohr Dahl, CRM Manager at Trendhim
Challenge: Technical needs and global strategy
In autumn 2023, Trendhim decided to expand their marketing mix with the SMS channel. The primary goal was to drive more revenue and profit with SMS across their international markets. They also had a secondary goal of reactivating more of their previously, but now inactive, customers using a new channel.
In August 2023, Trendhim decided to use inMobile's SMS gateway to test the potential of SMS marketing globally.
"At Trendhim, we take a very data-driven approach to our business and marketing. That's why it was important that if we were to start up a new channel, in this case SMS, measuring its positive effect had to be an option. For us, it's always a POAS above 1."
Kenneth Rohr Dahl, CRM Manager at Trendhim
When Trendhim was choosing their new SMS gateway, however, a number of technical challenges arose. It is very important for the company's marketing team to be able to accurately track their work with SMS before, during and after sending out an SMS campaign.
For Trendhim, click-through rates and estimated ROAS are not enough. They are extremely data-driven and calculate their POAS (Profit On Ad Spend) with great precision. Naturally, their SMS gateway must be able to support this.
"We have a setup where we segment and track our campaigns very precisely and across many countries. The SMS channel should work naturally into that setup as an effective and profitable part of our marketing mix."
Kenneth Rohr Dahl, CRM Manager at Trendhim
Solution: Email to SMS functionality
After thorough research, Trendhim chose inMobile's SMS solution. There were several reasons for this, including direct and personal support as well as competitive prices in Denmark and abroad. The most important factor was that Trendhim's technical challenges could be solved with inMobile's Email to SMS functionality.
In other words, inMobile was able to meet the technical and operational requirements Trendhim needed to achieve the desired results with SMS.
Specifically, this means that Trendhim now uses their email system, customer.io, to write, schedule, and send SMS messages, just as they usually do when sending newsletters to customers. inMobile then ensures that the email is converted and sent in the correct format so that the recipient receives the message on their phone as an SMS message.
For Trendhim's marketing team, this means they can do all their permission marketing and manage their tracking setup in one place: customer.io.
"Email to SMS has proven to be the right solution for us. This way, we can build our SMS campaigns in exactly the same way as our email campaigns. This means that we have been able to easily merge SMS work into our existing work processes."
Kenneth Rohr Dahl, CRM Manager at Trendhim
With the email to SMS functionality, Trendhim can:
- Create tracking URLs with UTM parameters and customer IDs for SMS, just like they do for their emails, 100% automatically through their email platform
- Get an accurate overview of click-through rates, and who is or isn't clicking
- Gain insight into the exact number of orders from those who received an SMS based on click data
- Trigger automations based on clicks in SMSes because links are person-specific. In other words, SMS creates value both through direct sales and by initiating automations such as abandoned cart, abandoned browsing, etc.
"It has been a long process to ensure that our SMS setup works technically, and many of the solutions didn't even exist beforehand. But in collaboration with inMobile, we found the right solution that works for us."
Kenneth Rohr Dahl, CRM Manager at Trendhim
How Trendhim uses SMS today
Trendhim now uses the SMS channel to push specific messages. Typically, they send an SMS campaign when they have significant sales and discounts or if there is a promotion where the customer can get something free with their purchase.
Often, a company's customers will be notified of promotional offers via SMS before they receive the message by email, which is why SMS acts as a kind of VIP channel in these cases.
SMS campaign from Trendhim that generated 7.5% CTR and POAS 2.6.
In addition to SMS campaigns, Trendhim has also set up several automations where SMS works as a supplement to their emails. Among other things, they have set up automation for abandoned cart and back-in-stock, where an email is sent to the customer first. If the customer does not respond to the email, a follow-up SMS is sent. Trendhim generally sees great results on these kinds of SMS automations.
"We have a really large permission database. That's why we usually send an email first, as it's cheaper for us. If the recipient does not respond to the email, we supplement with an SMS to increase the likelihood of the message being seen."
Kenneth Rohr Dahl, CRM Manager at Trendhim
Another automation that Trendhim has implemented is a reminder SMS for the delivery of parcels that have not been picked up within a few days.
🔎 Mini case: Reducing forgotten parcels and return shipping
Trendhim ships around 1 million parcels per year. Not all of these parcels are picked up, and it can be costly, as the webshop always offers free return shipping.
That's why they have tested the effect of sending an SMS reminder to customers who haven't collected their parcel five days after delivery to the parcel shop.
"If we can get more people to pick up their parcels, we can save a lot on return shipping, and at the same time, we also want our customers to get the products in their hands." Kenneth Rohr Dahl explains.
The hope and goal is that an SMS reminder can help reduce the number of returned parcels due to late collection.
They have only tested this SMS reminder for 2 months (April and May 2024), but the results so far look promising. So far, every 8th customer who otherwise wouldn't have picked up their parcel has picked it up after receiving the SMS.
According to Kasper Fisker Jensen, Marketing Automation Specialist at Trendhim, sending this reminder SMS equates to an annual saving in the 5-digits.
Result: Profitability in a global SMS strategy
The implementation of SMS has yielded noticeable results for Trendhim.
In the company's first 9 months of SMS through inMobile - specifically from August 2023 to April 2024 - Trendhim achieved an average POAS of 1.65 across all standalone SMS campaigns and all markets.
Trendhim's automated SMS messages show even better results. They have achieved an average POAS of 7-9 across audiences and countries, and some months they have even reached POAS 20-30 in some SMS automations.
Results for April 2023 - August 2024
(across all markets)
SMS campaigns: Average POAS of 1.65
SMS automations: Average POAS of 7-9
In other words, Trendhim has succeeded in achieving their goal of making the SMS channel profitable.
Results across the board
At Trendhim, they also keep a close eye on performance across the different markets and segments, and there's no doubt that some of these are showing very promising results.
For example, they find that the segment interested in bracelets almost always outperforms all SMS campaign segments.
At the same time, Scandinavian countries generally show good results, while countries like Italy, Finland, and Romania typically don't respond as well to Trendhim's SMS campaigns.
This knowledge and insight is hugely important for the company, as it allows them to constantly learn where their resources for the SMS channel are best spent.
Reactivation of previous customers
Finally, Trendhim has seen that the SMS channel engages and reactivates a good percentage of those who were excluded in their email setup due to lack of engagement.
"We're pretty strict about our subscribers. If they haven't responded for 3 consecutive months, we stop sending them emails. If so, we can try to reactivate them with an SMS, and if we succeed, it has a clear value for us, which can be hard to put a price on."
Kenneth Rohr Dahl, CRM Manager at Trendhim
It can be difficult to put an exact price on the value of reactivating lost customers, but as a rule of thumb, it's always cheaper to reactivate previous customers than it is to find new ones.
The future: More SMS permissions
The implementation of SMS has been a success and Trendhim is now looking ahead. Kenneth Rohr Dahl explains that they will be diving into their method of collection of SMS permissions and how they can get even more permissions to send SMS to the target groups that respond well to this channel.
"Some segments perform really well - and others perform less well. So, of course, we need to increase the volume on the target groups that work really well. For example, by increasing the amount of SMS recipients in our automations, we can increase POAS just by increasing the volume of those coming through our automations."
Kenneth Rohr Dahl, CRM Manager at Trendhim
At inMobile, we look forward to continuing the exciting collaboration with Trendhim.