Apparel That Celebrates Greek Life and HBCU Pride
The King McNeal Collection is a direct-to-consumer apparel brand built around the culture, history, and pride of Black fraternities, sororities, and HBCUs. Their designs let customers rep their organization, gift something meaningful to a fellow Greek, or show love for the college communities that shaped them. A customer base with deep emotional connection to the brand and clear, distinct reasons for shopping. Dispatch partnered with the King McNeal Collection to build and own their list growth engine from the ground up, launching the brand’s very first strategic popup and turning it into a compounding source of new email and SMS subscribers. The work spans full popup strategy and design on the Alia platform, dual-channel email and SMS capture, zero-party data collection for segmentation, and a relentless monthly A/B testing program feeding a Klaviyo-powered retention ecosystem. Rather than treating list growth as a one-time setup, Dispatch operates it as an always-on optimization program - testing, learning, and layering in new capabilities every month to push opt-in rates higher and lower the brand’s effective cost of acquiring a customer.
The Numbers Tell the Story
From the King McNeal Collection’s first popup launch through ongoing monthly optimization, the brand achieved the following performance improvements across its list growth program:
Where We Started
Before partnering with Dispatch, the King McNeal Collection was capturing only a fraction of the audience its paid traffic was already bringing to the site. List growth ran on a basic, set-and-forget popup, a single-step “Unlock 20% Off Your Order” form paired with a generic organization dropdown and an email field. It made the offer easy to overlook and even easier to close, and it treated every visitor identically despite the fact that a chapter member shopping for themselves, someone buying a gift for a fellow Greek, and a proud HBCU supporter are three very different buyers. Meanwhile, the form leaned almost entirely on email, leaving SMS (one of the highest-converting owned channels), largely untapped. Furthermore, with no smart triggering, no interactive elements, and no ongoing testing, the popup had no mechanism to improve over time, quietly capping how far the brand’s ad spend could stretch.
The key objectives identified were to rebuild the popup into a high-converting, on-brand experience worthy of the King McNeal Collection’s audience, to capture both email and SMS subscribers at the exact moment of intent, to collect zero-party data that could power meaningful segmentation, and to stand up a disciplined monthly testing program that would compound opt-in gains month after month.
A Foundation Built for Their Audience
Dispatch replaced the old single-step form with a purpose-built popup designed specifically for the King McNeal Collection’s community. The new experience leads with a clear, unmissable offer and pairs it with a simple segmentation question — “What brings you to King McNeal?” — letting subscribers self-identify as repping their org, shopping for a gift for a fellow Greek, or supporting their college. That single question turns a routine signup into a stream of zero-party data, so every new subscriber enters Klaviyo already tagged with their reason for shopping, ready for tailored messaging from the very first email.
Just as importantly, the rebuilt form captures both email and SMS at the point of intent rather than settling for email alone. This meant the King McNeal Collection could begin building a genuine omnichannel subscriber base from day one, opening up SMS as a high-converting revenue channel it had previously left on the table. The result was a foundation that not only converts more visitors, but converts them into richer, better-segmented, multi-channel subscribers.
A Relentless Monthly Testing Program
With the foundation in place, Dispatch treated the popup as a living asset to be improved every single month rather than a project to finish and forget. The first test introduced smart-trigger timing, showing the form at the optimal moment in each visitor’s session. It won decisively at 99.5% probability, lifting attributed signup revenue by 40% and signup-to-purchase conversion by 30%, while nudging both email and SMS submit rates up in tandem.
From there, each winning variant became the new control to beat. A headline test pitted an explicit “20% Off” message against a curiosity-driven “Mystery Discount,” and the data was emphatic: clarity beat curiosity, with the mystery version costing 21% in attributed sales and 27% in conversion. The program’s biggest breakthrough came from an interactive scratch-off format - tested across more than 128,000 popup views for a rock-solid read, which won at 100% probability and drove a 54% increase in email submit rate, a 43% increase in SMS submit rate, and a 13% lift in total sitewide orders. Each of these wins compounded on the last, steadily raising the brand’s opt-in rates rather than delivering a single one-time bump.
Layering in AI to Compound Every Gain
Once the manual testing program was consistently producing winners, Dispatch layered in Prism AI to squeeze out incremental gains that would be impractical to find by hand. Across two AI-powered elements and eight variants, validated over more than 100,000 popup views, the AI layer delivered an additional 4.7% average lift in email signups, a 4.6% average lift in SMS signups, and a 5.6% average lift in attributed orders, on top of everything the manual tests had already achieved.
The cumulative effect of this always-on approach shows up in the numbers that matter most. As of the most recent two-week window, the King McNeal Collection’s popup was converting at a 12.7% email opt-in rate and an 8.25% SMS opt-in rate, the former more than four times the 3% figure Klaviyo labels “excellent.” Every additional subscriber captured at those rates is one fewer customer the brand has to pay to reach again through ads, which is exactly how strategic list growth makes paid acquisition dollars stretch further.
