Emily Essner leverages first-party data to retain loyal shoppers at Saks

Most people typically associate luxury fashion marketing with glossy images of elegant socialites or wealthy influencers, not sprawling datasets. But under the leadership of Chief Marketing Officer Emily Essner, Saks has adopted what she calls a “highly data-driven approach” to winning over new customers and maintaining the loyalty of existing shoppers. Since taking the helm of Saks’ marketing strategy in 2020, Essner has increasingly steered the luxury retailer toward personalized shopping experiences and customer-retention strategies rooted in extensive data analysis. Over the past 12 months, Essner’s team has developed predictive models that help identify high lifetime-value customers—those likely to make repeat purchases from Saks—through first-party data, allowing the retailer to tailor its online shopping experiences accordingly. That data-driven approach to building customer loyalty fueled an 8% boost in average order value between 2022 and 2023’s fiscal years, according to Saks data. Essner’s efforts also contributed to a 7 percentage point surge in the retailer’s gross merchandising value in 2023, which Saks attributes to retained customers. Her expansion of Saks Limitless, the retailer’s invite-only loyalty program that grants top customers access to exclusive merchandise and events such as Fashion Week in New York, Paris and Milan, also helped Saks preserve its customer base. Essner’s marketing efforts in 2023 weren’t just confined to customer retention. Throughout the year, she and her team developed Saks’ new retail media network—one of the first such networks in luxury retail—which launched this April. She also facilitated Saks’ holiday collaboration with Dior on a massive New York City light show and window displays at Saks’ flagship store on Fifth Avenue. The launch event for Saks and Dior’s partnership featured actress Jennifer Lawrence and an AR experience across Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Dior Official (@dior) See Ad Age’s Tech Power List honoring marketing leaders What is the biggest technological challenge facing your sector of advertising and technology, and why? We’re living in a world that everybody says has too much content, but we’ve been living in that world for years and years now. So, what I’m really thinking about a lot right now is how AI is going to increase this, perhaps in a really exponential way, and create more and more content. And I think a lot of it is probably going to be sort of low-caloric value and is going to be able to be created really cheaply and easily. It’s going to make this problem we’ve all been grappling with for a while a lot trickier and, frankly, a lot bigger. How are you preparing to overcome this challenge? In the end, it all ends up being about “how do we stand out in a really distinctive way?” I think you do that by, of course, knowing who you are and not being afraid to be different—and being really maniacal about maintaining that differentiation across your brand and in every place that your customer is experiencing your brand. There’s sort of this ironic thing that’s happening where, coming out of the ascent of gen AI, I think a lot of brands really have to go back to basics in a way—really reevaluate exactly what they stand for, who they’re designing for, who they’re targeting. What technology could you absolutely not live without, besides your phone? My favorite tech thing right now is actually visual search. I live in New York City, and I’m out and about all the time and always getting inspiration wherever I am. So, I love taking a quick screenshot or shooting a picture of anything that inspires me—it could be a setting, an outfit, whatever. I’ve done this for years and years, and it used to be that translating that inspiration into something actionable would be a real pain. A lot of the time, you wouldn’t be able to find the actual thing or the place or whatever it was, but now it works nearly all the time and it’s so simple. And I’m using that inspiration not just for myself, but for my team. What’s your favorite blog, TikTok account, podcast or any must-follows in your media diet? I’m obsessed with the subgenre of baby-naming consultants on TikTok. I don’t know how I started getting these, but the algorithm was right—it’s so fascinating. It’s basically these experts who expectant parents apparently pay to help advise on their future child’s name, and they’re super fascinating because it’s just this wild alchemy of culture and class and aspiration and the zeitgeist, all combined into this weighty, quite literally lifelong decision. But I also think in this weird way, this captures the undercurrents that are sort of shaping how we think of who we are and who we want to be, all sort of distilled into these two-minute videos about what’s a great sibling name for Jake. See Ad Age’s Tech Power List honoring marketing leaders

Emily Essner leverages first-party data to retain loyal shoppers at Saks

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