The Business
PUMA is one of the largest sportswear brands in the world, operating in numerous countries and in multiple languages. The brand has a loyal customer base from everyone to “sneaker freaks” to holiday shoppers, and, especially with the recent shift to digital, a whole host of new digital customers.
The Challenge
- Growing a customer database
- Scaling personalization across multiple countries and languages, with a small team
- Building a complete view of the customer
Before partnering with SAP Emarsys, PUMA would send a standard email newsletter to their contact base on a weekly basis. They had nothing set up in terms of marketing automation, personalization, or customer lifecycle strategy. With CRM strategy in its infancy, they faced the complexity of serving customers in multiple segments across numerous countries in a variety of languages — and with a lean marketing team.
They needed a solution to help overcome these challenges, and allow them to activate audiences and deliver increased revenues during the pandemic (and beyond) when store closures across Europe were at their peak.
Their 3-pillar strategy of delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time needed to be implemented quickly to maximize the e-commerce opportunity and delight their customers with personalized experiences that they come to expect from a brand like PUMA.
-Rick Almeida,
VP Ecommerce PUMA
“SAP Emarsys is an incredibly valuable strategic partner in our efforts to deliver more relevant, contextual, and personalized marketing communications to our customers. By leveraging AI and automation against its rich vertical first-party data, SAP Emarsys allows brands like ours to generate greater insights into consumer behaviors, create more consistent, personalized journeys, and deliver them across all our consumers’ different touchpoints, whether online or offline, within one single platform. Our partnership has not only transformed how we communicate with our customers, but also allowed our marketing team to spend more time creating better engagement for consumers wherever and whenever they engage with our brand.”
The Solution
With SAP Emarsys’ customer engagement platform, the brand scaled marketing and CRM operations to identify and target high-value segments and grow the CRM database.
Learn More About Customers to Identify Highly Engaged Segments
Leveraging customer lifecycle insights, PUMA Europe continues to improve its customer identification capabilities to match up in-store with online data. PUMA implemented Smart Insights analytics to significantly improve personalized targeting. By knowing which customers are the most engaged, PUMA unlocks the revenue potential of those customers while increasing engagement and open rates. With a more complete view of the customer, the brand identified highly engaged segments likely to purchase in the next 2-3 months to send relevant content and recommendations, while also reducing the frequency of sends to less engaged segments.
“We worked very closely with SAP Emarsys to build all of our templates and build the logic that meant we could do that at scale. When we send an email, the logic is built, so the subject line will always appear in the right language for that customer. Any product that we feature will feature the right currency for that customer based on where they are… and we can use block targeting to really focus the content to make sure everyone’s seeing the right thing. And that essentially means we only need to build every campaign once.”
Scaling Personalization with Lifecycle Automation
The PUMA Europe CRM team works very closely with the SAP Emarsys customer experience team — an extended partner of PUMA’s CRM team — on various objectives from strategic initiatives to day-to-day builds.
PUMA and SAP Emarsys built the templates and the underlying logic that allows block targeting and automation to work seamlessly in the background, always displaying the subject line in the right language, the product in the right currency for the customer’s location with the correct promotions.
With a streamlined workflow built on fast-populating templates, PUMA Europe quickly scaled their email sends across all their markets, building each campaign only once.
Smart Insights
PUMA Europe identified highly engaged customer segments with Smart Insight dashboard, and applied insights to send more relevant content and recommendations, while also reducing the frequency of sends to less engaged segments.
Personalization with block targeting
PUMA Europe used block targeting with automation to ensure the content is relevant to the customer, including their local promotions, language, and behavior.
Value exchange for online email capture
With the email capture tool Web Channel, PUMA Europe grew their newsletter audience from 1K new subscriptions per week to 10K a week, increasing their audience by nearly 50% in 6 months.
Personalized product recommendations
By deploying targeted product recommendations, the brand now dynamically delivers the right message to each customer.
Scalable, sophisticated automation
In partnership with strategic services, PUMA Europe personalized 11 automated SAP Emarsys Tactics, like Back in Stock and Abandoned Browse, enabling them to scale 1:1 personalized engagements with a small team.
Optimizing performance
The marketing team engages customers at the right time using Send Time Optimization with open rates increasing 5-10%.
The Impact
Within 6 months, PUMA Europe grew email revenue by triple digits YoY and increased email engagement, driving up their newsletter audience by nearly 50%.
“We’re obviously A/B testing regularly and testing different functions, which means we can measure that incremental revenue. But also we’ve seen some really good results from an engagement rate perspective as well… And I think what we’re proving is that when you get to know your customers and you’re sending them more personalized things that they want to see, it just helps everything — we see revenue grow, engagement rates grow, better traffic, just a better overall customer experience.”
