Vans Retention
The Program • Marketing Design & Brand Strategy
OVERVIEW
Mere days after onboarding at The Program, a design and advertising agency, I jumped into helping Vans revamp their lifecycle marketing work. As the first designer on the Vans Retention workstream, my first task was establishing a strong foundation by creating a design library in Figma that would house all our bespoke modules, templates, and components.
Over the span of our on-going partnership, we found opportunities for segmentation, refreshed current automated journeys and created new ones, and injected strong narrative storytelling in all our comms. Our programming resulted in an increase in email opens and boosted engagement across segments.
MY ROLE
Designer
TEAM
AD Ari Vance-Borland, Ian Dalton, Alyson Agemy; Writer Mike Shymanski; Lifecycle Strategist Priscilla Smart
TIMELINE
May 2025 - Present
Product Campaign
Event Campaign
Post-Purchase
Digging Into the Data
From their consumer insights and performance data, we created segmentation to personalize communications to each of their core audiences. We evaluated their omnichannel approach, creating strategies to tailor campaigns and moments through each specific channel.
One of the biggest areas of growth we discovered through our deep-dive was the capacity to create more storytelling across all channels. In our segmentation, we created four target audiences based on demographics and shopping affinities to speak to consumers on a more personal level. One key segment was our women’s audience, and we tailored unique messaging and comms to reconnect and reignite interest. We moved from transactional emails to an editorial-first approach balancing brand priorities and seasonal consumer moments, adding narratives to better resonate with our audiences, refreshing current automated journeys, and creating net new ones.
One of our target areas of channel-specific strategy was growing SMS to create more personalized reach and engagement. We implemented A/B testing throughout various comms to gather ongoing data and feedback on what was working to continue iterating our efforts.
Effective Storytelling Through Segmentation
Trendsetter Women
Lifestyle Men
Rad Moms & Dads
A Retention Refresh
We cracked open their email framework with design. I created modular moments based on the type of send and segmentation to better appeal to our audiences and tailor our messages to what's most relevant at the time of the send. I frequently tested doorways, category blocks, headline placements, visual assets with stills and GIFs, and even the colors of the CTA buttons to make design more content-forward, dynamic, and visually compelling.
Connecting the Dots
In our results, we found immediate growth, increased traffic, and a boost in engagement across segments.
+73%
increase in comms MoM
+28%
increase in traffic from marketing emails YoY
2.7x
increase of click-throughs in highest performing email
Product Feature
Dual Gender
Athlete Campaign
Milestone Consumer Moments
In addition to creating hundreds of seasonal and standalone email sends, I led the conceptualization and execution of high-quality design systems for the two most important moments in DTC E-commerce, Back to School and Black Friday/Cyber Monday.
