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How Haute Hijab Drove $1 Million+ in Revenue With Drip

Find out how what started out as a side hustle—selling modest clothes and vintage scarves as hijabs online—turned into a multi-million-dollar ecommerce empire.

25-35%

Revenue attributed to email

$1 million+

Revenue attributed to Drip

30%

Increase in average order value

haute-hijab

Haute Hijab is a brand on a mission: to fundamentally change the way Muslim women purchase the most important piece of clothing in their wardrobe.

“Hijab-wearing women have been completely underserved in the ecommerce space. So many hijabis still purchase their hijabs at the mall, and these scarves lack quality or aren’t made to wear as a headscarf.” — Lindsay Dreyer, CRM Manager 

Founded by Melanie Elturk and Ahmed Zedan, their aim is to create a world where every woman feels comfortable and confident every time they leave the house (or appear on a video call).

Here’s how they used Drip's ecommerce marketing automation platform to turn their mission into a multi-million-dollar ecommerce business. 

Why Drip? 

As a small startup company where everyone wears many hats, the brand needed a tool that was built for ecommerce marketers and easy to use—yet powerful enough to handle all of their customer data. 

CRM Manager Lindsay Dreyer came on board in 2019 and recommended Drip, having been a previous customer.

“Drip is hands-down my favorite ecommerce email marketing automation platform.  It’s so much more intuitive and for lack of a better word, attractive, than a number of other tools I’ve tried. So many tools feel like an engineer built them exclusively for other engineers — not marketers.” — Lindsay Dreyer, CRM Manager 

Haute Hijab ultimately landed on Drip because of its ease of use, personalization, segmentation, and time-saving automation capabilities.  

Powerful personalization 

One thing that stood out about Haute Hijab right away? Their commitment to personalizing their customer communications from the outset. 

“Our Hijabi Quiz has been such a great email acquisition strategy. We've had a lot of success with our automations because we're able to serve customers products we are confident they'll like based on their unique quiz results. It's all about making sure we're serving customers the products and content that is most relevant!” — Lindsay Dreyer, CRM Manager 

Using an onsite quiz to gather people’s preferences helped them create that in-store brick-and-mortar experience online. Although they don’t have an associate there to ask what they can help with, Haute Hijab gets to know their customers' preferences through their quiz responses. They’re able to provide a super tailored experience through the follow-up emails that they send. 

Easy-to-use segmentation

Once you collect someone’s email address and information, the challenge is how to use it to create a great customer experience, and ultimately drive that first purchase.  

“Our biggest marketing challenges are making sure we're serving people the content they actually want and is relevant to them. Drip helps me refine my segmentation so I can serve people content based on what I know they're interested in. I never feel like I'm throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping it sticks. Every time I send an email I am confident I am reaching the right people.”  — Lindsay Dreyer, CRM Manager 

Because the brand relies on customer data to personalize their communications, the fact that Drip’s segments update automatically was a huge relief. And it took a weight off of CRM Manager Lindsay Dreyer’s shoulders.

“I'm constantly building, refining, and playing around with my segments. The ability to perform bulk operations, create automated rules, and tag people based on their behaviors and actions makes segment building a fun task rather than a daunting one. I'm not constantly second-guessing, ‘Wait, did I put the right people in this segment?!’" 

Segment building being a fun task, rather than a drag, had a positive effect on their business, too. 

Since they started using Drip, Haute Hijab was able to significantly increase revenue from email and SMS marketing month over month, while decreasing the number of emails they send. 

That’s a tell-tale sign they’re sending emails to the right people, versus blasting their entire list with general content. 

“About 25-30% of our revenue can be directly attributed to email and SMS marketing. We’ve seen a much higher ROI too because fewer emails sent means less spend overall.” — Lindsay Dreyer, CRM Manager 

Putting their customers first means recognizing that not everyone wants to receive every type of email. And the brand won’t send someone product-heavy content if they mainly engage in their newsletter.   

Dreyer says “we continually refine our segments so subscribers are getting served the most relevant content, in a way that's truly personalized to them.”

Shopify integration

Haute Hijab also needed a tool that could seamlessly integrate with Shopify, their ecommerce platform, and help them sort their list by the different data points they were collecting, such as people who have a preference for prints vs solids, or people who love satin vs sport hijabs. 

They collect customer data on their Shopify site and send it to Drip to use to personalize their emails, ads, and texts.

Seamless Facebook retargeting 

While email marketing drives 25-30% of their revenue, Haute Hijab goes beyond the inbox too. The brand uses customer data from Shopify, like purchase history and frequency to retarget customers on Facebook. 

“Drip's integration with Facebook makes targeting really simple." says Dreyer, "we target based on a number of criteria — purchase history, how many times they've purchased, etc. we do really well here.”

Similar to Drip’s segments, they love how easy Drip’s Facebook integration made advertising on Facebook. "The integration makes working with our social team a breeze. Instead of having to export a CSV for them and manually upload it to Facebook, it all happens automatically. What more can you ask for?" 

Haute Hijab’s Abandoned Cart Strategy

$200K+ in total revenue » $84 average order value in the last 6 months » 42% average email open rate in the last 6 months

A major revenue driver for Haute Hijab is their abandoned cart workflow. In addition to Drip’s ease of use and segments that update automatically, they love the pre-built workflow templates (or playbooks). 

“I love that Drip has a template for every type of workflow so you never feel like you're truly starting from scratch.” — Lindsay Dreyer, CRM Manager 

In addition to seamlessly integrating with Shopify and other major ecommerce platforms, Drip offers pre-built playbooks for the latest and greatest ecommerce strategies like abandoned cart, welcome series, post-purchase, and win-back. 

Not having to start from scratch made it quick and easy for Haute Hijab to set up their email marketing automations. 

“Cart Abandonment is one of the easiest ways to bring in additional revenue. It's a no-brainer. People abandon their carts for a number of reasons—maybe they got busy at home, perhaps their internet was cut out at the wrong time, etc. 

There's no way of knowing why, but what we do know is that they were interested at some point, and most likely still are. 

A cart abandonment email is a simple way to remind them, ‘Hey, don't forget you were looking at this.’ And it works!” —  Lindsay Dreyer, CRM Manager

They implemented Drip's abandoned cart playbook and, with some of their own testing and experimentation has seen over $200K in total revenue from the strategy. 

With an $80 average order value and 48% average email open rate from 2020-2021, it’s clearly working for them. 

Advice to other ecommerce brands?

If you’re looking for an intuitive, attractive tool built for ecommerce marketers, get Drip, says Dreyer. 

“Just get Drip. It'll make your life sooo much easier.” — Lindsay Dreyer, CRM Manager

Are you ready to grow your online sales through Drip’s automated email and SMS marketing platform?