Case Study: Gilt Groupe achieves over 50% of revenue from mobile with Carnival.io

Gilt’s mobile marketing automation tips for eCommerce apps

Gilt is a New York–based fashion and e‑commerce company that adopted a “mobile first” strategy to grow app conversions without alienating customers. Faced with the challenge of scaling timely, relevant messaging to millions of users, they needed to avoid spammy outreach while driving retention and purchases — today more than 50% of Gilt Groupe’s revenue comes from mobile.

Gilt implemented six tactics: a daily personalized sale per user driven by algorithms and feedback, purposeful real‑time push reminders, unobtrusive in‑app overlays with strict deployment rules, consistent timing for key sales (noon), a custom alert sound, and user control over message preferences. These measures — supported by an in‑house messaging system — produced large uplifts in engagement (often triple‑digit gains from personalization) and helped establish Gilt as a leader in mobile e‑commerce.

Gilt Groupe

Ruxandra Levy

Director, Mobile Engineering