Open Rate: 35%
Open Rate v. Industry Avg: +1%

Feature They Can’t Live Without: Email segmentation
Kunal and Abhi Madan are brothers who teamed up to build Amarra, a fashion design house that creates dresses for events like proms, weddings, and quinceaneras. Since opening the business in 2018, Amarra is on track to achieve over $80 million in retail sales in 2024. Their gowns are sold in over 800 boutiques around the world, bringing beautiful formal wear to customers in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
The inspiration for the business started years before as the brothers grew up watching their parents run a dress boutique. Abhi followed his passion for fashion design into his college years — he started Amarra as a side hustle while he studied business administration, finance, and marketing at The College of New Jersey. Meanwhile, Kunal was working in wealth management at one of the largest private investment companies in the United States.
“Over time, I naturally wanted to do my own thing and build my own wealth,” he said. “I moved to New Jersey, and Abhi started designing dresses. We figured out distribution. From that point on, we have probably been the largest formal wear distributor in the country.”
Working Smarter with Constant Contact
From the beginning, Kunal and Abhi knew they needed to be strategic about their marketing in order to grow their business.
“Even if you have the best product and the best service, it doesn’t necessarily lead to sales. The marketing is the biggest component that people seem to miss,” said Kunal. “Presentation is very important in this business, like the imagery of the product staying up front in customer’s computers. The more screen time you can get, the more conversion you can get.”

When they were looking for a marketing tool, they chose Constant Contact because it is a leader in the industry for email. Email templates, automation, and reporting save them weeks of work, which has been a game-changer for their processes. As Amarra grew, they hired staff around the world for a variety of roles, including managing the emails they send with Constant Contact.
With the extra hours they have thanks to using Constant Contact, the brothers can focus on other key elements of their business, such as search engine optimization, design, video, and photography.
Reaching Boutiques and Customers
Whether they are marketing to the shop owners purchasing gowns for their store or the customers wearing the dresses, Amarra makes sure they share customized and targeted messaging. By segmenting their email subscribers and sharing relevant content on their social media, they provide the right information in the right places. For example, not every boutique location has the same tastes or customers as another. “If it’s a Canada email blast, we’ll target more ball gowns. If it’s a Chicago email blast, there’ll be more fitted gowns. We target the emails based off location,” said Kunal.

Another key element of their email marketing success is their continuous effort to add emails to their contact list. Amarra actively grows their list of boutique contacts by attending trade shows, following up with inbound leads, and including a sign-up form on their website. On the customer level, Amarra uses sign-up forms in addition to SEO marketing and sharing content on channels such as Instagram and Pinterest.
“We gather their emails because once we have that subscriber list, we can guide them to our Find a Store page,” Kunal added. “We work on analytics and try to make sure our product is in the stores where our consumers are going.”
Catching Their Eye with Emails
Amarra acquired around 40% of their customers through email marketing. They feature trending colors, share new style numbers, and add urgency by sharing gowns that are selling fast. “We do email blasts through Constant Contact first,” said Kunal. “That’s probably the most important and the best return on investment. They immediately want to open it, see the new pictures and colors, and order that.”

Visually appealing imagery is crucial, which is why Kunal and Abhi invest in high-end video and photography for their website and emails. “We shot high-resolution dress images in Europe this season,” Kunal said. “We shot in Miami before. We take a lot of time planning and make a big investment in those photos. When we use them with Constant Contact, it really shows a really big return on that investment.”
Saving Time with Scheduling and Automation
Their future plans are to add more automations to their workflows because it simplifies their processes. When Kunal added 200 more people to their Canada list, all he needed to do was upload the Excel file, and they were able to send an email in the next three minutes.
During the busy season, they send emails every week, so they make sure to plan ahead and automate their messages. “It saves a lot of time. We used to mail out catalogs for our dresses to all these boutiques,” Kunal explained. “We would try to figure out who’s going to buy and who’s not going to buy, and it’s weeks of packing and shipping. Now, it’s just all digital and it has an immediate response. In our instance, the time saved is weeks.”
Measuring for Success
Kunal and Abhi taught themselves a lot about marketing through A/B testing and looking at analytics. They adapt their strategy based on the results they see in Constant Contact’s reporting tool. “[Constant Contact] is very easy and user-friendly. It shows you the most important data points right up front.” said Kunal. “The experience has been great.”

Some of the key metrics they look at include open rate and click rate. On average, Amarra’s emails achieve a 35% open rate, which is 1% higher than the industry average. They measure the success of an email in two ways: highest open rate and the most amount of orders. When looking at the open rate, they recreate the subject lines and attention-grabbing headlines that are performing the best. When looking at orders, they want to know how many orders an email blast generated and how many stores ordered because of that email blast.
“We’re able to dig in to see why they haven’t bought from us or the last time we reached out to them,” said Kunal. “[The reporting] is my favorite analytical tool because it’s the most important tool to the business.”
They look at which clients opened the email and clicked on links to learn more about a product or fill out a form. “You can gauge their interest level from their behavior,” Kunal said. “We get a lot of sales that way.”
Once a boutique shows interest, the Amarra team follows up with a call to introduce themselves. “[The boutique owner] will say, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that email before.’ The brand awareness has already started. If they come on board, we move them from general interest to our retailer list, and that’s when they become onboarded as a customer. So, it’s not that the email just does all the work. That’s what really helps the whole ecosystem work.”
Making a Pattern for Growth
From the beginning, Kunal and Abhi have aimed to achieve the best quality product and service, and part of their success has come from truly listening to their customers. “We ask for customers to give us feedback all the time, like what’s wrong with the product, or whether it’s good or bad. We want to improve it from the length of the dress to what types of dresses and what colors are selling, and we’ll act on it immediately,” said Kunal. “We won’t wait another season.”
Even while reacting quickly to feedback, the brothers have learned to be patient with their email marketing results.
“The first email wasn’t the thing that did it -– it was that second email, the third email, the fifth email. Two years of staying in front of [a customer] is what got them to eventually purchase.”
By knowing their audience, being persistent with their marketing, and making results-driven decisions, Amarra only continues to grow and adapt their brand. “If you’re going to do anything, you might as well do your best at it,” said Kunal. “To the people that are new or trying to start off in any industry -– just focus, work hard, make a great product, market it, and it’ll lead to success.”

