The challenge: Reverse email revenue trends without a short-term revenue sacrifice

Spanx, the innovator in their space, was navigating a more competitive market while moving their brand into an AI-first era. 

Daily email sends to a broad audience were pushing click rates down, creating significant unsubscribes, and hurting inbox placement. Add those up, and email revenue was declining. Past A/B tests on segmentation and cadence didn’t point to a clear path forward; and cutting send volume risked a short-term revenue hit. Spanx was stuck using all-or-nothing segments (e.g. “90-day engaged”) in spite of sitting on a huge amount of customer data.

The mandate for the Spanx team was clear: improve deliverability and grow campaign revenue, without a short-term revenue hit.

The approach: Using Orita to focus on Spanx’s most engaged customers 

Spanx loves Klaviyo and all of the ability to build bespoke flows and journeys for their customers. Their goal was to layer on Orita.ai and avoid a near-term revenue dip while improving inbox health. 

Working with Orita, Spanx moved from broad, frequent sends to AI-modeled engagement. They prioritized sending to their highly engaged customers while holding off on lower-intent profiles for when signals improved. This meant emailing people most likely to click and buy, improving deliverability without hurting sales. 

To accomplish this, Orita built a bespoke AI model for Spanx on their 2 BILLION+(!!) customer engagement points. The model updates daily and plugs directly into their Klaviyo account, so Spanx knows they are always sending to the most engaged audience today.

What changed: In just six weeks, Spanx’s key metrics climbed

• Revenue per campaign rose 31%

• Click rate jumped 36%

• Revenue per recipient climbed 64%. 

Whichever facet the team looked at for email revenue, the outcome was a considerable improvement. They did not see the short-term revenue hit they were avoiding, and have confidence that their email audiences are optimized. 

On top of this, lowering their unsubscribe rate meant increasing LTV by affording them the opportunity to email the right customer when she wanted to hear from them.

Increasing LTV had a surprise knock-on effect of lowering spend. “Orita helped us uncover engaged customers we already had, saving us significant acquisition costs. Because our LTV is better with Orita, it's also a multiplier on any new acquisition spend.”

And at the same time, Orita was able to find untapped revenue from folks who were active, but outside of the Spanx “business-as-usual” segment. 

Says Kyla Robinson from Spanx: “A significant portion of our list was technically active but fell outside of our standard targeting rules, often customers who hadn’t taken any action in over a year. Orita identified high-propensity buyers within this lapsed audience, allowing us to target and convert them despite the fact that we didn't have any recent signals of engagement. Before, the risk / reward of emailing these profiles wasn't worth it, but Orita gave us a much more refined approach to maximize revenue from this part of our list.”

The sleeper win: Rescued Revenue™

List cleaning keeps you safe—but it can sideline real buyers if you don’t have a way to bring back profiles that show signs of engagement. Spanx’s category can often have buyers who are dormant for longer periods of time, but who are still fans of the brand. With Orita’s ML model, Spanx was able to re-engage cleaned profiles who were ready to buy, with significant revenue impact. 

As Kyla Robinson from Spanx put it, “Spanx has long been disciplined about email list health, suppressing inactive profiles to protect deliverability and manage costs. Orita identified a segment of customers within that suppressed audience who were highly receptive to email. Activating that group unlocked a meaningful and entirely unexpected source of revenue. This would not have been possible without Orita’s AI segmentation.”

"We had a lot of customer data in Klaviyo, but broad engagement rules meant we weren't using it as well as we could. Orita changed that. Their AI scores engagement daily and maps it to category-level behavior, so every send reaches someone who actually wants to hear from us. 

Tighter audiences, more relevant content, fewer unsubscribes, and stronger revenue per recipient aren't a coincidence. That's what happens when your segmentation finally catches up to the complexity of your customer base. And because the models keep improving, our confidence in Orita as a long-term partner only grows."

— Kyla Robinson, SVP Digital