The Business
Outnorth is an online store which owns and sells Scandinavian outdoor/activity brands. The company represents quality, design, and excellent functionality.
With an online presence since 2005, Outnorth’s roots trace back to 1926. It is a well-known distribution partner for name brands that offers secure safe payment and worldwide shipping.
The Challenge
- Understand more about customers
- Growing efficiency small team
- Understand and optimize campaign performance
When Outnorth was looking for a new provider, their initial goal was to find a solution that would enable them to start creating more dynamic campaigns that would improve their productivity and ability to personalize customer communication.
After researching various options, the marketing team’s main requirement was to make sense of the data by revealing information about customer types and shopping behaviors to then infuse their marketing strategy with those insights.
Outnorth also wanted to move away from generic send lists, segment data according to their different customer types, and start building individual strategies to target customers. The broad nature of their previous targeting capabilities wasn’t delivering the kind of engagement via email that they were seeing on their website. The marketing team needed to be able to identify and segment their users to maximize relevance without stretching their own marketing resources.
Outnorth needed the ability to see how well their email campaigns were performing, including the value and uplift that email delivered. A product range of more than 11,000 items combined with standard newsletter blasts meant that the marketing team had a hard time pinpointing performance drivers and identifying valuable customer types.
– Henrik Wilnersson,
Head of Online Marketing, Outnorth
“We knew that we could do so much more with our existing customer data, but the question was how. Using a one size fits all strategy didn’t resonate with our customers, and trying to personalize content manually was affecting productivity.”
The Solution
The powerful data processing and execution capabilities of the SAP Emarsys platform was the perfect solution to Outnorth’s needs. With data-science-driven insights, Outnorth were able to understand more about their customers, including distribution across the lifecycle and what factors drove engagement and conversion.
Customer intelligence
The Unified Profile transformed Outnorth’s ability to work with their data, revolutionizing how they could view and understand customer behavior. With SAP Emarsys’ intuitive interface, the marketing team could quickly and easily build highly-refined and targeted segments, using virtually any aspect of contact or purchasing data in their campaigns. Using this customer intelligence, Outnorth could anticipate behavior such as defection probabilities to build lasting customer lifetime value.
Agile execution
With smart segments kept automatically up-to-date with contact behavior, Outnorth created intelligent automated campaigns, ranging from a highly engaging welcome program to all key stages of their customer lifecycle. As contacts transition across stages, they are moved from one program to another, freeing up the marketing team to spend more time designing campaigns and less on managing targeting, delivery times, and recipients.
Clear insights to guide business strategies
The clear and responsive reporting capabilities of Customer Lifecycle Analytics provided a highly strategic overview enabling Outnorth to scale success by highlighting growth drivers, star performers, best-selling products, and conversion drivers. With the ability to drill-down on product data, Outnorth were also able to work more closely with suppliers to create targeted, high-impact campaigns across the entire customer lifecycle.
The Impact
With SAP Emarsys, Outnorth have transformed fragmented operational data into smart insights, allowing them to understand their customers’ purchasing behavior and product affinities. The combination of smart segmentation, powerful multi-step automation, and highly responsive reporting has enabled their marketing team to better understand customers, act on the new information, and refine their marketing strategy with a new level of agility that is truly driving results from acquisition to retention.
“SAP Emarsys offers a unique combination of powerful tools and user-friendliness that means that it is easy for a marketer to use. You don’t need advanced technical knowledge to make the most of the features, and the instant reporting makes it easy to analyse progress on-the-fly.”
