0:00 Same. Yes. Okay. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Fashion Forward Marketing, how Michael Kors stands out with instant connections. 0:08 My name is Kim Levy. I'm a senior client strategy manager at Attentive. I'm so excited to be here today with Michael Kors to discuss how the legendary brand stays ahead of the curve. 0:17 Before we dive into the discussion, just a quick little about Attentive. Attentive is the AI powered mobile marketing platform transforming the way brands personalize consumer engagement. 0:28 Intensive enables marketers to craft tailored journeys for every subscriber, driving higher recurring revenue and maximizing campaign performance. Activating real time data from multiple channels and advanced AI, the platform personalizes content, tone, and timing to help brands like Michael Korsier deliver one to one messages that truly resonate. 0:47 Over eight thousand leading brands like Crate and Barrel, Crocs, Dyson, Guess, and more rely on Attentive to deliver engaging consumer experiences. 0:56 If you're interested in learning more about Attentive, you can feel free to click the link in the chat, or there's also gonna be a QR q QR code that's displayed at the end of our session today. 1:04 But enough about me and Attentive. Let's get into the good stuff. I'm gonna turn it over to Jordan to introduce himself. Jordan, thank you so much for joining me today and us. 1:13 Would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself and about Michael Kors? Yeah. Of course, Kim. Thank you for having me. So, hello, everyone. I'm Jordan Bowery. 1:21 I'm the senior director of retention marketing and global CRM for Michael Kors. I've been here for, coming up to ten years this month, so very exciting. 1:29 I did five years in our London office and five years in New York, which is why my accent might be a bit deceiving here. My team oversees all retention marketing channels, email, SMS, why we're talking with Attentive, Direct Mail, etcetera, as well as our loyalty program, our client selling program in store, and managing our customer database. 1:49 A bit about Michael Kors. Michael Kors is an iconic American designer led fashion brand with over forty three history forty three years of history in the luxury fashion space. 2:00 We partner with we've been partnered with Attentive since q three of last year. And already in that short time, we're seeing a great return on that partnership, so I'm very excited to be talking with them today. 2:12 Amazing. Glad to hear it. Well, you took the word out of my mouth. Michael Kors is a truly iconic and long standing retailer. 2:21 Given your years of experience in the retail world, how do you view the current retail landscape, and what's most important to you when you're creating your marketing strategy for the upcoming year? 2:31 Yeah. It's a great question. So I think retail is becoming more and more competitive, and consumer expectations are are rapidly evolving. 2:39 And I think it's more important than ever to stand out and really, to use a cliche cliche phrase, to meet the customer where they are. And I think mobile marketing is really becoming a really key way that we're driving that strategy. 2:53 Again, even more competitive now than some sometimes the desktop space. So, we really saw, a big lift when we when we looked at SMS because, we felt it was such a more personal and intimate channel than, maybe email. 3:07 Everyone's used to receiving tons of emails in their inbox, but the the idea of receiving something into your messages inbox can be quite intrusive. So we always wanna be a bit more mindful of of stuff like that. 3:18 Funny anecdote is, our our president once, when we're in a meeting, she she stopped the meeting because she received a text and was like, oh, Jordan's texting me now. 3:27 Like, you know, and it's it's although it wasn't me, it it it kinda shows how, customers, view the experience of receiving something into their inbox. 3:38 And we, beyond the anecdote, we really hope to, cultivate that same experience across, all of our customer base. Yep. Definitely. 3:48 I mean, to your point, a recent Gartner study shared that, ninety eight percent of US consumers own a smartphone and eighty five percent of them use them regularly, which, honestly, I'm surprised that that stat's not higher. 3:58 But, that's exactly the way that we we chat with our brands today. It's really important to be breaking through that noise, especially on mobile given that people are always on their phones. 4:08 So mobile marketing is essential for that customer engagement. So when you started working with Attentive, how did you think about balancing the need to be on mobile with breaking through that crowded space, and how did it how did working with Attentive help you achieve that? 4:23 Yeah. I think the biggest thing was the data that you guys have. I think, firstly, Attentive really helped us grow our program, which is kind of where it started. 4:32 I mean, I think it's where we needed to scale really quickly, and I think Attentive had a lot of out of the box, acquisition tactics that we leveraged very quickly to grow our database very quickly. 4:45 And then once we grew the data, having all of it in one place and available to use for kind of this rich segmentation and, a lot of options for driving behavioral triggers really opened up another avenue that we haven't, considered before. 5:02 So I I I think that was really the big thing. I think the the way attentive treat data, I think, is very different in the space to to other companies we've we've looked at and worked with, and I I think that was really appreciative for us because I think it has allowed us to, scale and then go deeper in our our personalization efforts and, raising really good returns on on the channel. 5:24 So it's been great. Totally. Yeah. Once you get past that sort of, like, initial list growth phase where your core goal is just to make sure that that scribe your subscriber base is growing at a really healthy rate, it's important to take advantage of all of the data at your disposal to really kinda curate those very personalized experiences, segment out your audience, which is one of the ways I agree with you, Jordan, that I think Intended really stands out. 5:47 We have that mobile first, sort of way of navigating data that I think is is really, really useful for our clients. So what were some of the ways that you leveraged SMS to stand out, and, what are some of your upcoming goals with SMS that you think, would continue help you continue helping you cut through that noise? 6:04 Yeah. It's a good question. I think, I think for me, it all comes back to the data again. I think having that rich data really allowed us to to personalize a lot of what we did. 6:15 So, like, over I mentioned over q three, and that's really our key kind of time period. And already, over Black Friday, we were able to, really curate the experience across all of our channels for our customers, and I think Attentive were a very big part of that. 6:31 So, being more intentional about what a customer was receiving. So if you opted into both email and SMS, we can create that kind of more personalized experience around a customer's preferred channel and really maximize our revenue opportunities and preserve costs, which was really helpful for us. 6:49 I think when we, when we onboarded with you guys, we did a lot of testing, to really understand what worked, you know, SMS versus MMS, send time, all of this stuff that we hadn't done before. 7:01 And I think now we have this really well oiled program because we know what works, and we've just optimized into everything that we know what works. I think going forward, the the kind of two things and, again, I'm gonna sound like a broken record. 7:13 I think it's more about the data, just because it's been such an untapped potential for us. I think more about, now we've collected that data and we have access to it, like, actually leveraging it. 7:24 I think we've done a fairly good job already with segmentation, but I think that's really where I wanna dig in further this year with the team, really kind of going deeper in what we're able to do and just making the content as relevant as possible for the customer. 7:38 And then I think the second thing we really wanna leverage a bit more of is, one of the one of the things that appealed about Attentive as well is the the kind of deep integration of, like, partner network you have. 7:48 There was a lot of very similar partners that we had, and, I think how we can leverage our whole tech stack to deliver those kind of more relevant communications is is gonna be really key for us this year. 8:00 Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. You said a couple of things there that I definitely wanted to to double click on. First and foremost, testing. Right? That's definitely the most one of the most important key factors of any SMS program, email program, whatever it might be. 8:14 Because luxury brands like Michael Kors, we hear a lot from them around, you know, maybe discounts and sales aren't always at your disposal. Right? So being able and open to testing like MMS, like that really personalized segmentation that you're talking about, getting more into, Jordan, is is super, super important and will lead them to more success. 8:34 But you also did bring up, our partner network. So, obviously, the reason why we're here today, Michael Kors is a big, attentive, and Bazaarvoice customer. 8:42 Can you tell me a little bit more about how you plan to use some of those integrations with Bazaarvoice or any other technology that might be in your stack that you're looking to sort of, you know, work in tandem with Attentive on? 8:52 Yeah. Of course. Bazaarvoice are a key partner for us across the business and, particularly our site team have done a fantastic job with Bazaarvoice and then with the ratings and review stuff as well as then the UGC stuff in partnership with our social team. 9:07 I think the team had won an award, actually, so that's really exciting. So we're doing a lot there. We partner with them from a CRM perspective on really making sure the the ratings and review collection around email has been as optimized as possible and making sure that's the best experience and also analyzing that data as well. 9:25 So, we've been really excited with what we've been able to do with them so far. I think we really value customer feedback at Michael Kors, and ratings and reviews is one of the best ways to get that direct customer feedback and help us improve as a business. 9:38 So we're opening up more, hopefully gonna start doing a, kind of store rating review experience, which is gonna be really exciting, as well as then obviously partnering with you guys around SMS. 9:50 I think there's a real opportunity to start collecting, reviews via SMS, thank you people for their reviews. We also integrate our reviews into our loyalty program, so there's an opportunity to talk around loyalty there. 10:01 And I think it just gives us another kind of nugget to talk about to the customer. I think the other partnership we've already taken advantage of with Attentive, which which has been good, is Mention Me. 10:12 Mention Me is our small but mighty referral program. I I think leveraging our our biggest fans to be become advocates of the brand and do our customer acquisition for us. 10:21 It's always great. It's been highly impactful for us at acquiring and retaining customers, but we wanna grow it. And we saw SMS as a real opportunity. 10:29 We noticed through mention me that a lot of our customers are sharing via SMS, so let's make it easier for them and and kind of reward them via SMS as well. So that's been really impactful. 10:38 We went live with that recently, and that's already seen some really good traction. So we're really excited about that one too. Yeah. That's super exciting. Anyway, I find that with the brands that I work with, any way that you can tap into sort of that, reward or kind of VIP vibe, within your SMS program is huge. 10:57 Right? So being able to do that with Bazaarvoice. There was also kind of a really great example that I saw with Michael Kors where you're able to sort of segment based off of the type of reviews that the person, is is is, posting via BizarVoice. 11:11 So being able to sort of segment out, again, just another way of kinda tapping into your audience and being able to personalize that content based off of the reviews that they've left in the past, is another really, really great idea of how to leverage the integration. 11:24 Alright. So it seems like we got a just a couple of minutes left. So I'll sort of just kinda ask you what are you most excited about in twenty twenty five, whether that's for Michael Kors as a brand, your SMS program, your Bazaarvoice program, kinda what's what's most exciting for you? 11:39 Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna ask, is that in life or professionally? But, I I guess it's a bit sad, so my answer is the same for both. So I'll answer it anyway. 11:48 I think for us, twenty twenty four was really a a kind of big foundational for year year for us kinda getting all the the kind of puzzle pieces in place to really kind of modernize our tech stack and do all that really cool stuff. 12:01 We've we've really built the foundation to to kind of jump off now, and I think twenty twenty five is where we can really unleash that potential. Talked a lot about data. 12:10 We've done a lot of, like, building the groundwork there. And now it's really how we connect all these customer experiences together and really deliver a personalized, experience for customers wherever they interact with us as a brand. 12:22 And I think that's that kind of omnichannel connected customer, personalized, all those buzzwords, I think is really where we're looking to go in in twenty twenty five. 12:31 And I think we've we're in a really good position to capitalize on that this year, so I'm really excited there. That's great. Yeah. Bespoke is another very vague buzzword that we've been using this year. 12:42 But not for me, I think yes. Definitely. For me, having a chance to work with brands like Michael Kors that, again, are really excited about the data that we can offer you guys, the support that we can offer, anything that we're able to test that would sort of lean into that more personalized standing out in the inbox sort of, sort of situation, is is really exciting for me as well. 13:04 So, just to wrap things up, thank you so much, Jordan, for the time today. It was great to hear all about, all about the exciting things that Michael Kors is doing with Attentive and Fizzarvoice. 13:15 Again, if you're interested in learning more about Attentive, please check out the link in the chat or scan the QR code that I think is gonna be popping up on the screen shortly here. 13:25 Also, if you're headed to Shop Talk in Vegas, Attentive will be there. Jordan will be there. Bazaarvoice will be there. We'd love to have you join us at our transformation lounge with Bazaarvoice. 13:35 We'll have dice and blowouts, makeup tutorials, espresso martinis, and more. So there is definitely something for everybody. But thank you all so so much for joining. 13:43 Jordan, any last parting words? No. Thank you for having us. It's been a it's been a great partnership with Attentive so far, and we're really excited to see where twenty twenty five takes us. 13:53 Alright. Perfect. Thank you so much, Jordan, and thank, thank you everyone for joining, and for having us today. Thanks, everyone. 14:01 Okay. Thank you all.
