"Emplifi helps us aggregate community posts on social. These give us more engagement than we get by adding our own photography." — Jon Palmer, Lead Marketing Manager at HYLETE
HYLETE converts their passionate community into loyal customers
Fewer brands take community as seriously as HYLETE. HYLETE is a community-backed performance apparel brand "devoted to innovation and quality without the high price tag." Founded in 2012, HYLETE, like many other digitally native vertical brands, focuses on serving a stellar customer experience to improve return customers.
With high-growth goals to meet of 30-40% year over year, HYLETE needed to employ an effective strategy for engaging their community while retaining their customer base. All of these were in addition to the core brand tenet: remain true to the community HYLETE had grown.
Acquire net-new customers, or focus on retention?
HYLETE saw the opportunity to collect user-generated content (UGC) from their community of passionate fans to improve customer retention. HYLETE chose Emplifi to collect UGC for popular items from top customers, which offers a dually positive effect.
Primarily, the social proof helped encourage cross-sells to the already engaged customer base. Secondly, the community members featured in the UGC responded positively to these features, increasing their brand loyalty. Because of this, HYLETE’s top customers purchase seven to eight times per year, which is more cost-effective than acquiring net-new customers.
"You're not going to get someone to order that many times unless they feel connected to a brand."
Engagement to build customer favor
As a community-driven brand, HYLETE prioritizes community engagement to maintain a happy customer base. But to align with the brand guidelines, HYLETE has to be selective about the type of UGC they curate from their community.
Emplifi’s language support tool allows HYLETE to connect with customers all over the world and respond to their images to encourage positive brand interactions. With Emplifi, HYLETE is able to make sure that every engagement is responded to, even if it isn’t going to be used for UGC, that way, every community member feels engaged and connected to the brand.
“Emplifi helps us tell our community story, which is crucial to HYLETE's success."
Text Ratings & Reviews
Part of HYLETE’s commitment to their community is providing a transparent customer experience through ratings and reviews of products. With Emplifi’s text ratings and reviews feature, HYLETE is able to overlay actual product reviews over UGC featuring the product. And this strategy is paying off for HYLETE.
Based on a survey of their community, reviews of an item are highly influential in the customer’s decision-making process. Being able to feature these reviews dynamically over the UGC rather than in a clunky widget at the bottom of a product description page creates a better, more valuable experience for the HYLETE customer.
Superior support
Being a 100% eCommerce brand, HYLETE relies on all technical parts of the site functioning at all times. An unreliable tool can cause serious hiccups for digitally native brands. Emplifi’s integrations with other core technologies that HYLETE uses, like Magento, make it easy for HYLETE to rely on all the functionality of the Emplifi platform.
"Emplifi has had virtually no Connection problems with Magento. We've actually tried to change other technology and not been able to because they couldn't properly integrate with Magento."
What’s next?
As HYLETE continues to grow and adopt the new features that Emplifi releases, their use of the tool continues to play an important role in their community engagement and revenue goals.
