Through dentsu X’s longstanding partnership with JCPenney, one of the nation’s largest retailers, the opportunity to create a customized holiday shopping experience for their customers came to light. JCPenney worked with the dentsu teams to harness the power of Intelligent Messaging, dentsu’s latest messaging experience solution.  

Collaborating seamlessly, the team reimagined 1:1 customer experiences during the busiest time of the year – the holiday season – with astonishing results.

The holidays are overwhelming enough without the added stress and confusion of finding the perfect gifts. And, having too many options can initiate the phenomenon of “gifting paralysis”, making it nearly impossible for shoppers to choose the right things for their loved ones. JCPenney recognized this pain point and worked to create a solution that would enhance customers’ holiday shopping experience, ensuring it’s as personalized, easy, and merry as can be.

Using the power of our Intelligent Messaging, the team created a way for shoppers to chat with the GiftBot to generate personalized gift recommendations for their friends and loved ones based on interest, price, product rating, and more. The program leveraged both Facebook and Instagram click-to-message advertising solutions to generate one-to-one conversations and utilized push notifications to highlight key holiday sale moments, a first amongst Meta’s retail partners.  

The program successfully achieved the team’s ultimate goal: providing useful, easy-to-use tech, and even adding a little fun to the customer’s shopping experience, courtesy of JCPenney.  

With a data-driven approach to audience development, the team leveraged powerful consumer insights to determine high interest categories and products to generate maximum user-experience and increase revenue during the all-important holiday season. 

The team utilized a custom “Now, Near, Next” roadmap to connect with JCPenney’s target audience: America’s diverse working families. The approach seamlessly integrated paid media and CRM. JCP was one of a handful of advertisers outside of the entertainment vertical to run both click-to-messenger (CTM) and click-to-Instagram direct (CTD) campaigns alongside “opt-in for marketing” messaging to drive valuable first-party data collection for future CRM activities. This effort gave the JCPenney team the ability to send recurring notifications and subsequent holiday messaging along with customized offers available exclusively to GiftBot users. Live links shared through the GiftBot experience sent customers to specific categories (jewelry, home goods, clothing, etc.) as well as the JCPenney offers page to avoid duplication. 

By focusing on offering the audience a solution to a significant holiday shopping pain point, JCPenney was able to acquire their next best customer and drive efficient conversions.  

By deploying a customized chat experience solution with an audience-first approach and a mix of paid media and CRM activities, JCPenney was able to bridge the gap between the physical and digital world. With GiftBot, they were able to bring a store associate to life on a digital platform for their shoppers. In a relatively short timeframe, we were able to achieve incredible results tied to JCPenney's goals:  

• 95% of all conversations came from people who messaged JCPenney for the first time.  

• A 3.8x higher conversion rate vs. business-as-usual campaigns during the same period. 

• 30% average opt-in rate to future communications by participants who messaged JCPenney for the first time.