Delivering Relevant 1:1 Customer Engagements to Accelerate Revenue

Nike is one of the most recognizable and influential brands across the globe. The business has an online presence and physical locations  throughout Hong Kong (HK).

To stay on top of the competition, Nike was looking to increase customer engagement and personalization through HK-specific campaigns, online-to-offline experiences, and advancing their use of email. With the help of the SAP Emarsys Services team, Nike was able to achieve record-breaking performance among annual 2024 key campaigns with the Double 11 (Singles’ Day) Campaign.

Nike HK was seeking to optimize their marketing budget to scale with their lean team. They wanted to effectively translate their collective understanding of customers, and identify targeted audiences for different campaigns to better target their messaging. Prior to their work with SAP Emarsys, they were sending batch-and-blast emails with one-size-fits-all content that lacked relevancy or personalization for their customers, a strategy that proved particularly ineffective during peak seasons like Double 11 (Singles’ Day) and their 10th Anniversary campaign in 2024. Nike HK needed a more sophisticated understanding of their customer’s purchasing and browsing behaviors so they could gain the insights necessary to improve conversion and brand advocacy.

By using the SAP Emarsys customer engagement platform, Nike HK removed the guesswork from taking complex customer and product insights and data and leveraging them. This helped them make decisions on who to target and drive customer loyalty. With SAP Emarsys, the brand could ground campaign decisions in data, using a powerful analytics tool called Smart Insight. The analysis allowed the brand to learn what worked and what didn’t, and apply those insights to future campaigns.

The SAP Emarsys Services Team supported Nike HK’s success, particularly during their 2024 Double 11 campaign. They conducted a comprehensive review and implemented key strategies to prepare for the 6-week campaign, including recommendations on offer strategy, segmentations, sending frequency, and more. This resulted in greater insights, better segmentation, and measurable increases to ROI. This milestone Double 11 campaign achieved the highest revenue of 2024, with AI driven personalization added resulted in a click to deliver rates uplift.  

Using Segmentation and Automation to Drive Personalization

Nike Hong Kong wanted to deepen their relationship with customers through better segmentation, automation, and customer lifecycle tracking. Nike HK had hundreds of thousands of customers, but not every customer was in the same situation. Nike HK needed to break customers down into purchase lifecycle groups, like first-time buyers, inactive, and defecting. The problem was: Nike HK had never launched a lifecycle campaign.

Without customer lifecycle tracking, it was impossible for Nike HK to treat their audience as individuals. With a huge contact database, Nike needed a partner that could help them segment more efficiently and help them engage their customers by lifecycle stage.

With SAP Emarsys, Nike HK was able to use AI to identify where their customers were in the buying cycle (and start to understand their customers better) and launch several campaigns including Welcome, Birthday, Abandoned Cart, and Browse Abandon. Since implementation, the conversion rate for these campaigns has shot up 110%. Proper segmentation allowed Nike HK to target the right audience with the right message, thereby increasing purchase rates by 8%. For example, if the AI determined a customer was more likely to purchase in-store, that customer would receive communication encouraging them to visit and shop at the nearest Nike store.

With help from SAP Emarsys’ support, strategic services, and client success teams, Nike HK was able to go from no lifecycle campaigns to launching 10 campaigns. Since starting this partnership, Nike HK has been able to provide a better, more engaging experience for customers, resulting in high engagement and conversion rates, as well as a 32.5% increase in site visits.

Nike HK inspired their customers to make sport a daily habit by scaling personalized customer engagements and refining customer experiences while achieving mutual growth by improving revenue and margins.

Email revenue grew beyond expectations, and lifecycle campaigns immediately yielded positive results. Service from the SAP Emarsys support team, strategic services, and client success drove up adoption and took the marketing strategy to the next level.