fashionette WhatsApp Marketing case study

How fashionette boosted customer engagement and sales with a personalized WhatsApp marketing strategy

7.4x higher conversion vs. most engaged email newsletter segment

18.1 return on ad spend (ROAS) across all campaigns

+25% higher AOV

fashionette's secret sauce is providing their customers an elevated, luxury shopping experience while staying approachable and connected.

Traditional communication methods like email and web notifications were not fully meeting their customers’ expectations for immediacy and personalization. To address these challenges, fashionette partnered with charles to implement a WhatsApp marketing strategy.

By leveraging WhatsApp, fashionette enhances customer engagement and drives repeat purchases.

"I really like the entire UI of the charles platform – how easy and accessible it is; everything is just so native. And the ability to automate as much as possible across different use cases to increase the efficiency on our end."

Janna Bernert

Team Lead CRM

Source

The Challenge:

How do you create genuine, personal connections with customers when you’re not selling your own products but curating the best from other brands?

Founded in 2008, fashionette is a fashion company offering a carefully curated selection of premium and luxury products, including handbags, shoes, accessories, and more. Operating across six European countries, their mission is to provide customers with a high-quality, luxury shopping experience.

In the competitive world of luxury retail, success isn’t just about the products – it’s about the relationships brands build with their customers.

However, fashionette faced some key challenges: declining engagement, limited marketing touchpoints for collecting valuable customer data, and a noticeable drop in email newsletter subscriptions and interactions across web and email channels. Additionally, customers were hesitant to share their preferences, making personalized engagement difficult.

To overcome these obstacles, fashionette needed a solution that would strengthen customer relationships, enable direct and personalized communication, and ultimately drive sales and conversions.

The Solution:

Partnering with charles to enhance lead generation and enable zero-party data collection, fostering higher engagement and boosting sales through targeted, personalized customer communication.

With charles’ WhatsApp Marketing platform, fashionette connects with customers in real-time, delivering exclusive offers, personalized recommendations, and engaging content tailored to the modern luxury shopper. This strategic move has transformed WhatsApp into a key channel for customer engagement and revenue growth, unlocking a new level of customer-centric marketing.

1. Acquiring WhatsApp subscribers: fashionette leverages strategically placed website CTAs and social media ad campaigns to attract new leads. By offering compelling, brand-aligned incentives – such as seasonal discounts or exclusive giveaways, they encourage customers to opt-in and become part of their WhatsApp community.

Collecting subscribers for their WhatsApp newsletter by offering a 10% discount

Sunglasses for up to €300 were offered in this social media ad example

2. Collecting zero party data: To create truly personalized experiences, fashionette needed deeper insights into their customers' unique preferences and interests. Through an interactive WhatsApp opt-in flow, they gather a double opt-in, along with key data points such as email addresses, favorite designers, and preferred campaigns. This information is securely stored and leveraged to tailor future marketing campaigns and communications, ensuring a more relevant and engaging customer experience. Their WhatsApp welcome flow shows a 4.1x higher conversion rate vs. email.

Collecting preferences and email addresses via the WhatsApp opt-in flow

3. Converting leads to first-time buyers: fashionette uses WhatsApp promotional campaigns to drive high open, engagement, and conversion rates. By leveraging customer preferences and behaviors, they deliver tailored content focused on new arrivals, seasonal trends, discounts, and fashion inspiration – ensuring a more relevant and engaging shopping experience.

To further enhance their impact, fashionette pairs WhatsApp marketing with creative Out-of-Home (OOH) campaigns, bringing a truly multi-channel experience to life.

Early-access campaign for Black Week paired with a 25% discount on the customer's favourite products

Examples from fashionette's successful 'Get your Gucci' campaign showing the creative power of combining offline advertising with WhatsApp

4. Increasing retention: to maintain long-term engagement and drive repeat sales, fashionette implements automated WhatsApp campaigns that enhance the customer experience and strengthen loyalty such as:

Real-time alerts for new arrivals and promotions – Luxury shoppers value exclusivity, and being the first to know about new collections, limited editions, or seasonal drops, makes them feel prioritized. Instant WhatsApp alerts ensure they never miss out on coveted pieces
Birthday campaigns with exclusive offers – Personalized birthday messages with a special discount or gift incentive creates an emotional connection with customers, making them feel valued and more likely to return for future purchases

The impact*:

charles x WhatsApp has helped fashionette meet their business goal of increased engagement and higher sales from their customer base.

When looking at their marketing mix as a whole and how they combine WhatsApp with their email marketing programs, fashionette are able to see quantifiably higher rates across the following metrics (more on WhatsApp KPIs here). These numbers have been taken as an average across all their sales and promotional campaigns within the charles platform for the past 6 months:

7.4x higher conversion rate vs. their most engaged email newsletter segment, leading to increased sales

18.1 return on ad spend (ROAS) showing a better return on every Euro spent on advertising

+25% higher average order value (AOV) showing an increased propensity to purchase more or higher value items with the use of WhatsApp

How they have been able to achieve these results is by collecting valid data, sending highly personalized content and activating event triggers – all in an immediate channel where customers talk to their friends and family.

*All KPIs are averages from the last 6 months (as of February 2025)

What's next:

A focus on loyalty, personalization and efficient automation.

After successfully growing their subscriber base, driving first-time sales, boosting engagement, and retargeting, fashionette is now focusing on leveraging customer data from its CRM solution, Emarsys, in combination with the charles platform to further increase sales and drive retention. They are specifically focusing on these use cases to build personalization and automation:

Abandoned cart flows – implementing strategies to recover abandoned carts and re-engage potential customers, reducing lost sales and bringing them back into the funnel
Birthday automations – sending personalized birthday messages to make customers feel valued, deepening their emotional connection with the brand and encouraging repeat purchases
Event-based triggers – using timely, event-driven messaging (e.g., follow-ups after multiple product views) to increase conversions and drive more sales opportunities

Why charles?

There were three main reasons why fashionette chose to work with the charles platform:

The easy-to-use, native UI of the platform and automation capabilities – making it easy for them to work with the platform across all levels of the marketing team. And also being able to automate flows and campaigns, complementing what they were doing in their email marketing.
The integration with the Emarsys CDP – which enabled them to handle their customer data between the two systems natively, enrich customer profiles and enable event based triggers based on customer behviour and preferences.
Success expertise and use case playbooks – through which they were able to adopt a channel-native approach right from the beginning, enabling them to be successful early on and create harmony between their email marketing and website setup.