You’ve watched her play an intelligent new anchor who stands in integrity in Apple TV’s original series, The Morning Show. Despite being one of the most visible celebrities in TV, Movies, and the digital media landscape, Reese Witherspoon has remained relatively unacknowledged as a business powerhouse despite launching two successful e-commerce brands.
In the footsteps of other celebrity entrepreneurs such as Jessica Alba, Beyonce, Rhianna, and the Kardashians, Witherspoon has launched and helped build Draper James, her lifestyle clothing brand, and Hello Sunshine, her production company.
Both brands grew to a combined worth of more than a billion dollars. Hello Sunshine was sold in 2021 for a reported 900 million dollars to a media company backed by the private-equity firm Blackstone Group Inc. Witherspoon just sold 70% of Draper James to Consortium Brand Partners for an undisclosed amount,
It’s true that Witherspoon has the power of celebrity behind her and a built-in consumer base ready to spend money on anything she endorses. Still, there are several simple but effective e-commerce strategies the business maven employed to ensure the success of her brands.
Here are a few e-commerce growth strategies Witherspoon employed could be applied to your business.
Creating an Authentic Customer Experience
Witherspoon brings southern charm to her social media presence and how she talks about her brands. That southern charm is the inspiration behind Draper James—a contemporary wardrobe line of clothing.
Draper James is renowned for their use of creating authentic customer experiences. That Southern charm, that sense of Americana, is reflected not only in their cuts, colors, and fabrics but in the customer experience as well, and it’s a central part of how they create an authentic experience for their customers.
Whether shopping online or in-store, the brand puts in the work to remind you of embodying sensibilities and style that are quintessentially Southern and creates an experience across both channels that is virtually seamless.
From their signature blue-and-white striped wall at their flagship in Nashville that customers happily pose in front of for playful UGC to the cash wrap with stools placed for friends to chat and fawn over dressing room looks, Draper James puts real thought into authentic, shareable experience, which helps increase customer retention, encourages brand ambassadorship, and builds brand loyalty.
There are numerous instances where a challenger brand’s experience doesn’t match up to how it was marketed or lacks consistency, which can feel disconnected, disjointed, and otherwise disappointing for a potential customer.
Some of the most successful brands have built customer loyalty and increased their customer lifetime value by setting the tone for establishing authentic connections with their consumers and maintaining that authenticity in how they conduct business.
Every element, every touchpoint of the customer experience matters. Build your brand universe with intention and a commitment to your core values and those of your ideal audiences by keeping in mind how you want customers and prospects alike to feel. Innovate ways you can not only anticipate their needs and concerns but also ways you can surprise and delight them to make the experience they have shopping with and engaging with you eons better than any experience they’ve had in the past with another brand.
Using Conversational SMS Marketing to Create Meaningful, Valuable Experiences
Draper James is legendary for their text message marketing campaigns. They’ve leveraged platforms like Attentive to build authentic, conversational campaigns (true to their southern brand) and developed effective SMS campaigns in kind, having achieved a 152% subscriber growth increase over five months and achieving program ROI of over 29x.
These campaigns served two purposes; they helped move slower-moving inventory and most importantly, gave the brand a greater window of visibility into what customers want that created new opportunities to serve them well.
As of July 2022, 71% of traffic to online retailers came from phones, and 61% of online orders were completed on mobile. Conversational or two-way SMS marketing has quickly become a must-have for brands seeking to more effectively and intimately reach more of their customer base who perhaps otherwise would miss messaging delivered by email or paid traffic.
Take a Deeply Layered, Cross-Channel Approach
Reese Witherspoon is a highly visible celebrity who can be seen on social media, in the press, on e-commerce platforms, and her website.
Draper James and Witherspoon’s other brands use a multi-channel approach to e-commerce marketing and customer acquisition. They understand that to reach a multitude of consumers, you need to reach them on the platforms they frequent.
Optimizing your e-commerce marketing using a multi-channel approach allows you to diversify how you build an audience and reach consumers. It will enable you to adjust targeting to be laser-focused on a particular platform in the most effective method for that platform.
When you think about how many touchpoints consumers generally require from a brand before making a purchase decision (at least 20, according to most marketing analytics for eCommerce), and the average length of the consideration process for an eCommerce prospect (upwards of 18 months, according to $93 million in customer journey data at The KR Agency), it only makes sense that relying on one or just a few platforms to reach, convert, and nurture consumers is a terribly ineffective strategy for most e-commerce brands.
Taking a multi, cross-channel approach, however, enables brands to establish an environment that allows for plenty of touchpoints that ultimately make consumers feel like you’re everywhere, which does tend to instill stronger faith in the brand, overall.
Adopt Customer-First Policies
Witherspoon’s companies value a high level of customer service and do so by taking a customer-first approach. These policies ensure customers are being heard, employees are involved in the process, and many touchpoints are built to make the experience exceptional.
One of the most critical aspects of building a brand that scales and becomes name-recognizable is your customer service. Creating customer-first policies sends a clear message to your team and customers—it shows how much they matter.
The way Draper James does this is by paying keen attention to reducing return rates and taking care to provide strong experiences with the brand, even in the rare event a customer is disappointed with their purchase. The brand views return requests as opportunities to win over and win back customers, which makes a real impact to their bottom line.
Borrow from Draper James’ playbook and walk through your entire customer experience. What can be changed or upgraded? As you give customers exceptional service, systemize and add automation to the process. Create SOPs that walk new team members through customer-driven, experience-oriented policies and continue evolving this experience as new data presents itself.
Reese Witherspoon has used her celebrity to build billion-dollar e-commerce brands using principles you can apply to your brand. These may seem like common sense, but it takes skill to implement what feels simple.
Create authentic customer experiences, use modern modalities to reach consumers, tighten up your customer service, and use your brand authority to continue to build your e-commerce business.
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