How Beach Riot Unified Email and SMS to Build a Smarter Lifecycle Strategy With Attentive

Marketing a brand built on constant newness

Beach Riot’s customers always have something new to discover.

The brand regularly introduces fresh colors, seasonal prints, collaborations, and category expansions. Some collections are tied to major shopping periods, while others build momentum through early access, limited availability, or the excitement of a new product drop.

That pace gives Beach Riot frequent reasons to connect with customers. It also creates a complex messaging challenge.

The team needs to introduce products while they still feel new, help shoppers discover styles relevant to their interests, and respond quickly when someone moves closer to purchasing. At the same time, the brand has to protect the energetic, expressive personality that keeps customers engaged between promotions.

Email and SMS both play important roles in that strategy. The opportunity was to help the channels learn from one another so Beach Riot could make each interaction more relevant—and make every campaign or journey a better starting point for the next one.

Building on a trusted SMS partnership

Beach Riot began working with Attentive on SMS in 2021. Over the following years, the channel became an important way to announce collections, support promotional moments, and reach highly engaged customers.

The relationship also gave Beach Riot access to a customer success team that understood the brand’s business, audience, and launch calendar.

As Beach Riot evaluated its marketing tools, the team began exploring what could become possible if email joined SMS in Attentive.

At the time, Beach Riot managed SMS in Attentive and email in Klaviyo. Both programs were established, but operating them separately created extra work for the team.

Beach Riot wasn’t interested in consolidation for its own sake. Any move had to make day-to-day decisions easier.

“Knowing how important personalization and the customer journey are to consumers today, it made sense to explore Attentive first—to have that customer journey picture all in one lens and make sure we’re talking to the right consumer through the right channel.”

— Chelsea Olchowy, Director of Digital, Beach Riot

Beach Riot already trusted Attentive SMS and the people supporting the program, so expanding the partnership to email felt like a natural next step.

Bringing the customer journey into one clear view

After deciding to move email from Klaviyo to Attentive, Beach Riot began preparing for the migration in 2025. The implementation included technical setup, templates, domain preparation, subscriber data, deliverability planning, and approximately eight core journeys.

The team completed its email warm-up and journey transition in early 2026.

Beach Riot has an active campaign calendar, so the migration needed to protect momentum. Campaigns still had to reach customers. Welcome and abandonment journeys still had to run. Sending volume had to scale without putting deliverability at risk.

Attentive implementation, email strategy, and deliverability teams worked alongside Beach Riot throughout the process. Instead of treating the migration as a direct platform transfer, the teams used it as an opportunity to reconsider timing, entry criteria, exclusions, message frequency, and the role each channel should play.

The migration also changed the questions Beach Riot could answer about performance.

“Because we were getting reporting on two separate platforms, it was sometimes double attributing both platforms. Now that we see everything in one place, we’re starting to see that a lot of our customers are really converting on email versus SMS. It’s a lot easier to figure out who we message through email first or SMS."

— Jacklyn Tran, E-commerce Director, Beach Riot

That clarity became the foundation for a more coordinated channel strategy.

Making each channel strengthen the next

A unified platform does not mean every customer receives the same message through email and SMS.

Beach Riot gives each channel a distinct job.

Email offers room for visual storytelling. The brand can introduce a complete collection, feature multiple products, share styling inspiration, and give customers time to explore.

SMS supports more immediate moments. It can alert VIP customers to early access, announce that a collection is live, remind shoppers when availability is limited, or respond when someone demonstrates high purchase intent.

Because the channels now share customer signals, Beach Riot can coordinate them without making the experience feel repetitive.

An email engagement can help determine whether an SMS follow-up would be useful. A purchase can suppress a reminder the customer no longer needs. Browsing behavior can influence which collection appears in a future message.

This gives Beach Riot the flexibility to build around the customer rather than a fixed channel sequence.

For some campaigns, email can carry the complete story. For others, SMS can create urgency or reinforce a moment that began elsewhere. Each interaction helps Beach Riot make a more informed decision about the next one.

Growing the owned audience without adding friction

Subscriber growth is especially valuable for a brand with Beach Riot’s launch cadence.

Every new subscriber gives the brand another opportunity to introduce an upcoming collection, offer early access, and build a relationship beyond a single website visit.

Beach Riot had already spent time improving the timing, frequency, and placement of their sign-up experiences. The team understood that a sign-up unit needed to capture attention without interrupting the shopping experience.

AI Grow added a more adaptive approach.

Instead of showing the same sign-up experience to every visitor according to a fixed rule, AI Grow uses real-time behavior to determine when and how the experience should appear. Beach Riot could personalize subscriber acquisition without manually maintaining an extensive set of timing and page-level rules.

The team tested AI Grow against Beach Riot’s existing sign-up experience using a controlled traffic split. The test drove a 17% lift in SMS sign-ups and a 17% lift in email sign-ups.

That growth strengthened the entry point into Beach Riot’s lifecycle program across both channels.

New subscribers could move into welcome experiences that introduced the brand, highlighted relevant products, and supported consideration over time. By improving the initial sign-up moment, Beach Riot created more opportunities for its campaigns and journeys to work long after the first visit.

Finding valuable audiences beyond manual segments

Beach Riot’s approach to personalization begins with the customer’s interests.

Someone browsing pink bikinis may be relevant to a different campaign than someone exploring activewear, bridal styles, or tennis apparel. The brand’s product variety makes those distinctions meaningful.

Manual segments give Beach Riot a clear starting point. The team understands the collection, the creative idea, and the customers most likely to care about it. The challenge is finding additional relevant subscribers without defaulting to a full-list send.

For Beach Riot, that decision is part of the team’s everyday campaign process.

“We’ve been on AI Pro for a few years, and it’s a tool that we utilize pretty much daily when we’re sending campaigns. It helps us include audiences we normally wouldn’t have included, and that personalization helps us improve metrics like click rate and open rate."

— Jacklyn Tran, E-commerce Director, Beach Riot

AI Pro builds on the team’s strategy by using behavioral signals to find people who may be difficult to identify through manual rules alone.

Beach Riot also uses AI-powered exclusions to remove subscribers who are unlikely to engage with a particular campaign. That can reduce unnecessary sends, protect audience health, and help the team expand reach without defaulting to sending every message to the full list.

This balance is important. The goal is not simply to reach more people. It is to find more of the right people while keeping each message connected to what the customer has shown interest in.

Applying AI with intention

Beach Riot brings a test-and-learn mindset to AI.

The team doesn’t use every AI capability for every campaign. They evaluate each tool based on the message, audience, and moment.

Send Time AI, for example, can be useful when a campaign remains relevant throughout the day and the team has flexibility around delivery. A product launch or time-sensitive promotion may still need to reach every customer at a specific time.

The same principle guides audience selection. A broad collection launch may benefit from AI-powered expansion, while a niche product or highly targeted story may call for a smaller segment based on known behavior.

AI supports Beach Riot’s judgment rather than replacing it.

The team maintains control over the brand story and campaign objective. Attentive AI adds behavioral insight and helps Beach Riot identify opportunities that would be difficult to uncover or maintain through manual logic alone.

Recognizing high-intent shoppers earlier

Many shoppers visit a website, explore products, and leave without completing a purchase. Whether the brand can follow up depends on its ability to recognize the visitor and connect that behavior to a known subscriber.

Identity AI helps Beach Riot recognize more high-intent shoppers.

Once someone is recognized, Beach Riot can respond through journeys based on product views, browsing sessions, carts, checkouts, and other behavioral signals. The resulting message can reflect what the customer actually explored instead of relying only on a broad promotion.

Across Beach Riot’s journeys, Identity AI produced a 12.1% lift compared with the non-AI baseline. During a separate 30-day measurement window, it drove an approximately 10% lift in abandonment revenue.

That incremental recognition gives Beach Riot more opportunities to re-engage shoppers who have already expressed interest.

It also improves relevance. Someone who viewed a particular collection can receive a useful reminder, while someone who completed a purchase can be excluded from a message that no longer applies.

The technology expands what Beach Riot can understand and act on without losing sight of the person behind the behavior.

Turning customer intent into always-on journey revenue

After the email migration, Beach Riot continued expanding and refining its lifecycle program.

The program includes welcome, cart abandonment, checkout abandonment, browse and session abandonment, post-purchase, winback, back-in-stock, loyalty, birthday, anniversary, and VIP experiences.

Each journey addresses a different customer moment.

Welcome introduces new subscribers to Beach Riot while their interest is still fresh. Cart and checkout journeys respond to shoppers who moved closer to purchasing. Browse and session abandonment allow the brand to follow up earlier in the decision process.

Post-purchase journeys can deepen the relationship after a sale. Winback and milestone programs give Beach Riot ways to reconnect with customers over time.

Welcome remained Beach Riot’s strongest revenue-generating journey as the newly unified program moved from migration to scale. With both channels in one platform, the team could refine timing, entry criteria, exclusions, frequency, and channel sequencing using a clearer view of the customer journey.

Email and SMS were no longer simply operating alongside one another. Together, the channels created more opportunities for Beach Riot to respond when customer interest was highest.

These always-on journeys give Beach Riot an important counterbalance to its campaign calendar. The marketing team can focus on launches, collaborations, and seasonal creative while automated experiences continue responding to individual customer behavior.

Connecting loyalty milestones to timely messages

Beach Riot’s lifecycle strategy doesn’t end when a customer makes a purchase. By connecting Yotpo Loyalty with Attentive, the brand can turn loyalty activity into always-on journeys that recognize progress, surface available value, and keep the relationship moving between orders. That gives the team a way to respond to meaningful customer moments without relying on a one-off campaign for each event.

Beach Riot currently has seven Yotpo-powered journeys live in Attentive: Points Earned, Tier Earned, Customer Birthday, Points Expiration Reminder, Points Reminder, Redemption Created, and Referral Completed. Together, they span the loyalty experience—from earning and remembering points to reaching a new tier, creating a redemption, celebrating a birthday, and completing a referral.

The journeys are designed to coordinate channels as well as triggers. Several pair SMS and email inside the same automation, giving each channel a role in the follow-up instead of treating the loyalty event as a single, isolated send.

The Points Earned journey, for example, begins with a 30-minute wait and then checks whether the customer has received a Customer Birthday email since entering. If so, the journey ends. If not, Beach Riot can send an SMS that inserts the number of points earned and the customer’s updated balance, followed by an email. The Tier Earned journey uses a similar SMS-and-email sequence, inserting the member’s new tier into the text message before an email recognizes the milestone.

That personalization extends across other loyalty moments. The Points Reminder journey can include the number of points nearing expiration and the date they expire. The Referral Completed journey can deliver the reward and insert the customer’s discount code. Instead of asking customers to look up their program status, Beach Riot can put the most useful detail directly into the message.

These journeys expand the role of automation in Beach Riot’s program. Campaigns can continue carrying the energy of new collections and seasonal moments, while Yotpo-powered journeys respond to individual milestones as they happen. By bringing loyalty signals into the same Attentive program as welcome, abandonment, post-purchase, and winback journeys, Beach Riot can make more of its messages relevant, timely, and useful.

Creating new ways to respond before the cart

Session abandonment became a particularly meaningful addition to Beach Riot’s lifecycle strategy.

Beach Riot had not previously run session abandonment in Klaviyo. Activating it in Attentive allowed Beach Riot to respond to visitors who demonstrated interest during a browsing session but did not necessarily view the same product repeatedly or add something to a cart.

This created another useful moment between initial discovery and purchase.

With session abandonment live, Beach Riot gained another way to recognize and respond to customer interest before it reached the cart.

The team continues to improve these journeys through timing, entry rules, frequency, segmentation, and channel sequencing.

Beach Riot has also explored adding touches to selected abandonment journeys and reducing how frequently the same customer can re-enter them. These refinements help the team respond to customer interest without overwhelming subscribers.

Keeping customers engaged between promotions

Beach Riot’s program is not limited to discounts. One standout example was Beach Riot’s “We Made More Colors” SMS campaign. The message led with product newness rather than a discount and became one of the brand’s strongest campaigns by revenue share during the period reviewed.

Beach Riot’s campaign strategy reflects that same discipline. Across the first half of 2026, every SMS campaign was segmented, while 78% carried no incentive. That balance helps the team reach more of the right people without teaching customers to wait for a promotion—and gives product stories like “We Made More Colors” room to perform on their own.

Some of the brand’s other strongest creative opportunities come from product news, new colorways, styling ideas, and the energy surrounding a collection launch.

A campaign may introduce a new activewear color, feature a resort edit, or highlight pieces designed for tennis and pickleball. Another may focus on a collaboration or limited collection tied to a cultural or seasonal moment.

VIP segments can receive advance access to selected launches. This rewards engaged customers while giving Beach Riot an early signal of demand.

The response can then inform the broader campaign. Strong early engagement may influence which products are highlighted, how frequently a collection is promoted, or whether SMS should reinforce the launch after email.

Email and SMS give Beach Riot different ways to tell those stories. Email can immerse customers in the creative, while SMS can create immediacy around availability or access.

Because Beach Riot can coordinate the channels, those messages feel like connected parts of the same brand experience instead of repeated promotions.

Scaling email with confidence

Bringing email into Attentive also gave Beach Riot specialized deliverability support and clearer visibility into program health.

Deliverability was an important consideration before the migration. Beach Riot needed confidence that messages would reach customers reliably as the team completed the email warm-up, migrated journeys, and increased volume.

Attentive worked with Beach Riot on the email warm-up, sending strategy, list health, and ongoing monitoring.

As Beach Riot moved beyond the email warm-up, the team scaled campaign volume while continuing to monitor deliverability and program health.

Journey email maintained a 99.4% delivery rate in Q2 as the automated program expanded.

That foundation gives every other part of the strategy a stronger opportunity to perform. Creative, segmentation, personalization, and AI-powered decisions only matter when messages reach customers reliably. With that foundation in place, Beach Riot can continue testing how each send contributes to the broader relationship.

Turning insight into action with a team that knows the brand

Technology was only part of Beach Riot’s decision to expand the partnership with Attentive.

The team also wanted support from people who understood Beach Riot’s customer, creative cadence, and distinct personality.

Attentive customer success, implementation, email strategy, deliverability, and technical teams worked alongside Beach Riot throughout the migration and continued supporting the program after launch.

The partnership covers both planning and execution. The teams collaborate on journey strategy, segmentation, campaign calendars, sign-up experiences, deliverability, testing, and major seasonal moments.

That collaboration matters most when the team needs to move quickly.

“They are very responsive when issues come up. I always receive a response within the same day, and the team follows up if there isn’t a resolution right away.”

— Jacklyn Tran, E-commerce Director, Beach Riot

That consistency gives the team confidence to keep testing. Beach Riot can explore new audiences, journeys, and AI capabilities knowing the team has specialized support behind the program.

Customer success manager Erica Brennwald had worked with Beach Riot before the email migration. Chelsea explains why that continuity mattered:

“Our CSM has such great ideas, knows our brand, and really feels like an extension of our brand. I even joked when we were signing, ‘We’re only doing this if Erica stays on our account,’ because that was something we needed: insights, learnings, and recommendations that could feel like an extension of us.”

— Chelsea Olchowy, Director of Digital, Beach Riot

For a lean digital team, that relationship extends what Beach Riot can do. The team gains proactive ideas and specialized expertise while keeping control of the brand’s creative direction.

The partnership is not limited to resolving platform questions. It helps Beach Riot identify opportunities, turn insights into tests, and keep evolving its strategy.

Making every message build on the last

After moving email from Klaviyo to Attentive, Beach Riot could understand their customers more clearly and create a more connected experience across channels.

AI Grow helps more visitors become subscribers. AI Pro helps the team find additional high-potential customers. Identity recognizes more shoppers whose behavior signals meaningful intent. Coordinated journeys turn those signals into relevant follow-up.

Unified reporting helps Beach Riot understand which channel is influencing conversion and determine what should happen next. Strong deliverability helps ensure those carefully planned messages reach their audience.

Together, these capabilities support a lifecycle program designed for the way Beach Riot works: visually, quickly, and with a steady stream of new reasons to reconnect with customers.

Behind the technology is a team that understands the brand and helps Beach Riot continue testing without losing what makes their customer experience distinct.

For Beach Riot, bringing email and SMS together was more than a platform change. It created a clearer way to learn from every interaction—and make every message more relevant than the one before it.