It’s thousands of years old, but the ancient practice of yoga got a Beverly Hills makeover in ’07 when the founders at Alo Yoga merged wellness and stretch fabric, and cast Kendall Jenner as the brand’s face. Now Alo Yoga generates about $1 billion a year in sales, and their tech-savvy marketing team has dabbled in crypto, built a presence on Roblox, and committed to a robust SMS program.

Text messages helps drive about $40 million a year for the brand. “SMS now represents 4% of our total business revenue,” Cher Fuller, senior director of digital marketing told Modern Retail.

To understand how Alo Yoga uses this channel, Tiny Texts tracks all of Alo Yoga’s text messages, roughly 6 – 12 sends a month. Below we will explain 5 tactics that Alo Yoga leans on to create a successful text program.

5 Text tactics We Learned From Alo Yoga

1) New Product Announcements

Alo Yoga’s business and marketing strategy relies heavily on new product announcements. Every few weeks they are announcing something new -including but not limited to skiwear, formalwear, skincare, supplements, and plenty of celebrity collaborations. And so it’s no surprise that their text messaging strategy also focuses heavily on new product announcements. On average we see about 4 texts per month feature new product drop announcements, like these two Alo sent in January.

2) MMS Only

Among fashion brands, we see a variety of approaches to using imagery in texts. Frame and Skims almost always include images; Khaite never includes them. Bergdorf never includes them either. As for Alo Yoga, the brand consistently includes images in every text. If you’re paying attention to costs, this does add up. Brands spend about $0.1750 to send each SMS message and about $.04250 to send each MMS, or multimedia message, which is a message with an image or gif.

3) Segmentation

So far we have not noticed Alo sending very different campaigns to their various customer segments, but they are clearly keeping track of how different segments respond to the texts they do send. In an interview with Glossy, Fuller said when they began the text program, “The first findings were that Alo’s younger shoppers prefer SMS and don’t really check their emails. The second [top converting] segment on text was [AloAccess] members who want early access [to new color drops].”

4) Wild Berries and Espresso

Roughly every 2 -7 days Alo texts subscribers with a new color drop, announcing the arrival of shades like Wild Berry, Espresso, Bluestone, Olive Tree, and Midnight Green. Scan their past texts and you’ll see new color drops make up a large portion of the messaging strategy. These messages are a huge traffic driver that get subscribers to visit the site, even if they don’t purchase that particular item.

Fuller said that in 2023, Paradise Pink — a shade straight out of Barbie — successfully drove new shoppers to click. But if they actually converted, it was black leggings they purchased first.

“[A bright color or trendy item] may be the fun thing that brings you in, but it’s not where new customers are converting,” Fuller said.

5) New Landing Experiences

Before the holidays, Alo’s team A/B tested linking text customers to the homepage versus a page called New To Alo. Fuller said, “What we learned is the conversion rate was so much higher going to the New To Alo page, so we switched all the links [for Alo’s holiday marketing].”

Now roughly half of Alo’s texts link customers to the New Arrivals page. They also frequently link to Best Sellers, and also to landing pages for a specific collection or colorway. It appears that they learned an important lesson from those A/B tests because they never link to the Alo homepage any more.

Conclusion

Alo Yoga’s constant flow of new products and new colors, imagery and landing experiences gives them plenty of fodder to power an active text strategy. Check out tinytexts.co for more intel on how the best brands are using SMS to drive their business, from Tiffany & Co to Urban Outfitters.