Nectar Sleep Turns Playful Brand Voice Into a Serious Email and SMS Revenue Tool

Brands invest heavily in a distinct identity at the top of the funnel, then hand the customer to email and SMS programs that read like every other retailer in the inbox. The messages sent closest to a purchase are often the most interchangeable a company produces, assembled from the same discount phrasing and the same expiration warnings. Retention channels carry direct revenue targets, pulling teams toward copy proven to convert and away from anything that sounds like the company behind it. Rising consumer expectations have raised the cost of that trade at the exact moment a shopper is ready to act.

Tracy Yoon is Senior CRM Manager at Ashley Digital, where she owns email and SMS for Nectar Sleep, a direct-to-consumer mattress brand. Her background covers 15 years of e-commerce and retention work at Philips, Godiva Chocolatier, Estée Lauder, and Nespresso, and she serves on the Attentive Commerce Council. Her approach to the channel traces back to an early career in publishing and beauty, categories where tone and imagery were treated as commercial assets long before ecommerce existed.

"If I can see a message in SMS or email that I can literally copy and paste and put anywhere, that brand doesn't have a voice. It's about infusing personality in addition to reaching the sales goals every business has to meet," says Yoon. Nectar's messaging runs on a relaxed, playful register that she pulls from the brand guidelines and then extends into the promotional copy itself. The test she applies is portability, and a line that would work for any competitor has failed it. Other brands in the category have noticed, and she has seen versions of her own copy turn up in their sends.

Standing out in the inbox

Discount messaging across the mattress category converges on a small set of phrases, and the length of the purchase cycle makes that convergence more visible. A mattress buyer spends weeks on review sites and affiliate comparisons, so by the time someone opts into a text program they have already seen many versions of the same offer. Yoon treats that repetition as an opening, and writing the sale in the brand's own vernacular is what earns the open. "It's a way to highlight the point of difference in a sea of sameness," says Yoon. "That helps put you front and center in an inbox or on a mobile device, so there's a revenue component tied into it."

The vocabulary comes right from the product. Nectar's guidelines supply the sleep-adjacent language, including lines about better mornings and better rest, and Yoon extends it into the promotional calendar where most retailers default to urgency formulas. An offer becomes a chance to "upgrade your ZZZ's". Deadline copy gets the same treatment, in a category where every competitor announces that a sale ends today. "We're talking about sales, but instead of saying 'ends today,' I might say the sale's about to snooze," she explains. "It's leaning into the sleep language that's unique to the product."

Preferred size and direct address

Voice carries the brand and relevance carries the offer. Nectar asks subscribers for their preferred mattress size on the SMS signup unit, a single dropdown alongside the email field that turns the opt-in into a source of first-party preference data. The field costs the subscriber one tap and gives the program something specific to work with on a channel where every character counts. "We know most people are coming from mattresses, so we've been able to collect that field," notes Yoon. "First name is one of those things marketers joke about, because it's not really personalization. Adding that preference is a way to say we know what size you're looking for."

Direct address does similar work at the sentence level. Yoon writes in second person wherever the message allows it, framing the offer around the purchase the subscriber already has in progress. The construction is a small one, and it changes how the message reads on a phone. "I try to use 'you' a lot more now, like in 'Your new queen is waiting for you,'" she adds. "When I'm referencing you specifically as a person, it makes you feel like you're being talked to versus at."

Coupon codes and delivery details

Voice and relevance both depend on the message working when someone taps it. Yoon builds each send around the conditions it will meet on a phone, where a subscriber is doing several things at once. Roughly seven in ten shoppers abandon their carts, and a broken landing page or a dead promo field turns a high-intent click into an exit. "There's an idealized view of what we think people are doing and the reality," says Yoon. "People's attention spans are even smaller now, so my goal is to make sure the CTAs are clear and there's no friction when they click through."

Catching those failures before a send goes out is part of the role as Yoon defines it. Her checks extend past the copy to the promo codes and destination pages that belong to other teams. Nectar treats the Fourth of July as one of its largest promotional windows, and a coupon error on a holiday that size reaches a large subscriber base within minutes. Yoon found one ahead of the send. "I noticed there was a bug with one of our coupon codes," she notes. "If that had gone live, it would have caused a lot of customer service complaints and people unsubscribing."

Fulfillment introduces gaps of its own. Some Nectar mattresses ship through a third-party provider, so the next update a customer receives comes from an unfamiliar sender. Yoon rebuilt those transactional messages around that handoff, adding the shipping partner's logo so the follow-up email is recognizable. Holding a subscriber past those moments counts toward long-term retention. She reads her own inbox the same way, unsubscribing from programs where every send sounds alike. "It's not just about the sale, it's also bringing the brand to life," Yoon concludes.