While growth is always a positive thing in the sometimes-volatile retail industry, businesses can sometimes face a series of challenges as they expand — especially in how they design and implement marketing campaigns.
APACSale, an online shopping club, has managed its ongoing growth with the help of the SDL Intelligent Marketing Suite, a solution designed to help businesses plan and execute campaigns quickly and efficiently.
After exploring several options, APACSale selected the SDL Intelligent Marketing Suite “to send a significant amount of customer communications and target the best products and offers to relevant customers at the right time,” said Jim Lees, Head of Data Marketing at APACSale, in an interview with Retail TouchPoints.
Since implementing the solution, APACSale has seen email click-to-open rates increase by 50%. Email inbox placement also has improved 18% versus industry benchmarks. Campaign revenues grew 7% when customer and product targeting was applied.
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“APACSale now combines effective customer analytics with dynamic and personalized email campaigns as part of a wider customer experience strategy that includes search, mobile and localization,” Lees said. “This level of integration and analysis — which allows central and regional marketing teams to access sources of data from a single system for use in analytics and campaigns — automatically propels us above the competition.”
APACSale has seen rapid yet consistent growth, with more than 250,000 new members joining every month — especially as the company continues to expand across Asia. With more members came more data flowing into APACSale’s database. To keep customer engagement consistent and personalized, APACSale needed a solution that could meet new marketing requirements.
“While company growth is a great problem to have, it meant that APACSale would soon be having trouble understanding key trends amongst the wealth of customer data they were collecting, based on billions of customer interactions,” Lees explained. “A major priority was the necessity to scale its volume and turn-around time for communications with the speed of a rapidly growing business across many markets.”
New Data Access Enables Personalized Interactions
With the SDL Intelligent Marketing Suite, APACSale is able to handle the influx of customer data being generated and offer valued interactions based on individual preferences. The solution gives marketers access to data they needed to reach their goals and keep customer interactions consistent and personalized without straining internal resources.
“Fast access to data and a platform that can be used across a wide team is vital,” Lees noted. “It means that key business insights and marketing campaigns can be reactive to competition and actioned by the marketing team without the need for IT to get involved. This also means that communications can be real time and IT can focus on the other areas where they are needed.”
APACSale now sends daily customer communications, promoting the most relevant products to customers at the right time.
“Understanding where each customer is in their lifecycle allows the marketing team to fine-tune its marketing efforts and improve customer engagement,” Lees said. “This includes getting customers to purchase sooner, reducing the payback time on acquisition campaigns and retaining more profitable customers by being aware of key triggers which might make them spend elsewhere.”
