How Brilliant Earth Uses Data to Grow Its Fine Jewelry Sales

Customers are loyal to companies that share their values. Brilliant Earth, the digital-first fine jewelry company, is a perfect example. Brilliant Earth has a mission to bring responsibly sourced and environmentally sustainable stones and materials to its customers. While best known as a resource for bringing transparency to big-ticket jewelry like engagement and wedding rings, Brilliant Earth has brought the same ethical approach to other fine jewelry items on a wide scale. The brand knows its audience well — Gen Z and Millennials — and leverages an omnichannel approach to convert first-time buyers into repeat loyal customers.

All Channels Lead to Email

The most effective way to encourage repeat purchases is to understand individual customers, and target them with the most relevant content. Brilliant Earth has 1.8 million email subscribers that generate around 600,000 engagements on a monthly basis. To build this broad audience scale, Brilliant Earth makes it easy to sign up for their email program — both digitally and in-store.

“If they're following us on social media, we want to make sure that we’re giving them an easy pathway to join that newsletter audience. So creating links to add to our link bios, they can click through and find us if they are visiting us in a showroom, we create QR codes that they can scan in that showroom and automatically be added to our list, simple as that.”
- Kim Turano, Email Marketing Manager, Brilliant Earth

Customers shopping for engagement rings are unlikely to make additional purchases of the same item as other retail categories. However, Brilliant Earth has efficiently understood how to tap into customized lifecycle journeys based on personalization and preferences.

Using Sailthru by Marigold, Brilliant Earth notes the custom variables that mark what individuals are most interested in and immediately sends them through customized journeys with the most relevant content. This creates an authentic, holistic experience as Brilliant Earth converts first-time buyers into repeat customers who purchase for special occasions like anniversaries and birthdays, and no longer need tactical content about buying an engagement ring.

“Those custom variables on users’ profiles are really, really important to us. And we use those in a lot of different ways. So we're hitting those people with a welcome flow. As soon as they sign up, we also have browse abandonment flows, cart abandonment flows, really making sure that we're touching all of those key lifecycle moments and Sailthru by Marigold really just makes that so easy with their visual editors. It's such a great tool and easy to use.”
- Kim Turano, Email Marketing Manager, Brilliant Earth

Innovating Customized Journeys, Delivered at the Right Time

Brilliant Earth doesn’t just stop at optimizing the lifecycle flow, they’re also leaders in experimenting with new tools and techniques to engage audiences and gain valuable preference indicators. Kim describes how Sailthru’s Liveclicker integration extends Brilliant Earth’s social tactics and delivers in both driving engagement and customer data:

“Liveclicker is such a fun tool. One of my favorite ways that we have been using it lately is we introduced a live poll in the newsletter. So users could go into the email, they could click whether they liked a hoop or a huggie, a stud or a halo style. And the poll updated in real-time. I can see the way that the poll numbers change when I click my answer, but it's also giving us really great information on the back end. Now we can send them content based on that huggie earring style.”
- Kim Turano, Email Marketing Manager, Brilliant Earth

Perhaps one of the most brilliant relationship marketing tactics Brilliant Earth employs is its “Drop A Hint” feature. The company developed a custom email flow for someone to share a favorite ring and stone style with a partner — in a way that feels natural and collaborative. Brilliant Earth finds that Gen Z and Millennials are more likely to make buying decisions together, this “soft nudge” approach was built to take a little pressure off a huge life decision.

Customers quickly adopted the “Drop A Hint” program, which became one of the company’s highest-converting campaigns. The program also gives Brilliant Earth additional profiling markers to create new, modified lifecycle journeys for new acquisitions.

Brilliant Earth has met revenue expectations and expanded both its physical and digital footprint by understanding its target audience and sending the most relevant content at the most effective, personalized times. To hear more about how Brilliant Earth partners with Sailthru, part of Marigold, to take re-engagement to a whole new level, watch this video from Signals 22.