Founded in 2004 by Gorjana and Jason Griffin Reidel, Gorjana is a contemporary jewelry brand offering customers pieces they can wear every day and effortlessly layer together. Now, with eighteen store locations and a new line of fine jewelry to complement their more subtle collections, the team continues to expand their brand reach through a variety of channels across physical and digital retail.

When gorjana came to Endear last fall, their primary focus was to give their store teams the power of SMS in order to increase traffic at their locations. They believed communication by text message would make it easier for customers to stay updated on store news and products, and enable the store teams to more seamlessly communicate back and forth with their local audience. Using Endear, they put their theory to the test.

Now, gorjana's retail strategy leverages Endear's SMS templating capabilities to meet and exceed their store sales goals. By using templates, the brand retains key promotional messaging while allowing their store teams to continue the conversation organically with customers who respond. Because gorjana's strategy revolves around increasing store traffic, their templates include a few key elements:

• All templates address each customer by name, with a sign-off from the associate who sends the message.
• Where applicable, they include an in-store-only offer to entice customers to visit and provide important store details, like operating hours.
• Messages are short and sweet, but still sound like they were written by a human.
• The messages make it clear that customers can respond over text, email, or phone and they'd still be speaking to the same person who initially contacted them.

With Endear's omnichannel attribution system, we are able to determine exactly how effective this messaging strategy is - and "effective" is quite the understatement. gorjana's messages see an average 8.4% conversion rate, with most customers converting within a week of being contacted and 65% of sales occurring at a physical store. What's more, when SMS is used to respond to a customer directly (a reply rather than a bulk outreach), the conversion rate increases to an astonishing 20%. Clearly there's no disputing the advantages of true, 1-1 digital conversation made human. Through the pandemic and beyond, gorjana continues expertly utilizing Endear to develop real relationships with their customers.

Another upside to selling and customer communication via SMS: due to the instantaneous nature, SMS often results in higher and more frequent engagement compared to email. In fact, SMS conversion rates across the board tend to hover around 2.14% (a whopping 20x better than typical email marketing conversions, according to Klaviyo) — with gorjana's holiday strategy performing nearly 4x better than that!

Statistically speaking, SMS has proven to be a powerful channel across the board. Consumers tend to respond within 90 seconds of receiving a text, and most consumers today are eager to communicate with their favorite brands over this channel compared to email or phone. However, unlike SMS marketing platforms like Attentive, Endear ensures retail salespeople can use SMS to have authentic, two-way conversations with their customers with the goal of closing more sales. As gorjana's strategy demonstrates, staying in touch with customers and working with them until they cross the finish line delivers results.

Ready for more? Here's another helpful blog post that provides a variety of campaign ideas that you can execute through SMS.