Losing the Scent
Arosmic is a UK-based affordable luxury fragrance brand offering designer-inspired eau de parfums that are vegan, cruelty-free, and crafted in their English perfumery. By cutting out costly celebrity endorsements and excess packaging, they deliver premium scents at a fraction of designer brand prices. Despite a loyal customer base and strong product offering, Arosmic faced challenges with customers abandoning baskets at the point of purchase and struggled to drive repeat orders from existing customers. With digital remarketing alone failing to recapture high-intent prospects and encourage additional purchases, they wanted to test whether programmatic direct mail could add incremental value across two key customer journeys: abandoned basket recovery and next best purchase.
The Perfect Blend
Arosmic partnered with Paperplanes to deploy programmatic direct mail across two distinct customer segments — abandoned basket (targeting customers who had left items in their basket without completing purchase) and next best purchase (targeting recent purchasers to drive repeat orders). The campaign reached 527 abandoned basket customers and 1,482 next best purchase customers, with each mailing carefully crafted to reflect Arosmic’s affordable luxury positioning and the sensory nature of fragrance. Dynamic content was tailored to each customer’s browsing or purchase history, with data integrated directly into the Paperplanes platform so mailings triggered at the optimal moment in each journey, and frequency was carefully managed to ensure customers received a considered, premium touchpoint rather than feeling oversaturated.
Scent-sational Success
The campaign delivered impressive results across both segments, with mailed customers 9.4% more likely to convert and spending 9.7% more per basket than non-mailed cohorts, proving that direct mail’s tangible presence resonates particularly well with fragrance buyers who value sensory, premium experiences. The abandoned basket campaign was the standout performer, achieving an 8.9% conversion rate amongst mailed customers, 36% higher than the non-mailed cohort, demonstrating that physical mail cuts through at the critical moment of purchase consideration when digital retargeting alone has failed. The next best purchase campaign converted at 2.6% and drove an 18.6% higher average basket value amongst mailed customers, indicating that direct mail not only encourages repeat purchase but also pushes customers towards higher-value orders. Together, these insights establish direct mail as a powerful channel for Arosmic, with clear opportunities to scale and optimise across the full customer lifecycle.
