Delivering Contextual, Relevant Experiences Through Personalized Lifecycle Automation

+26% increase in year-on-year revenue
+15.78% uplift from Post-Purchase automation
+160.14% uplift from Defective Buyer win-back automation
+80% uplift from a single 3-stage Welcome campaign
Golfer in a green shirt swings a club under a clear blue sky with trees in the background.

The Business

  • Retail/E-commerce, Sports & Outdoors
  • United Kingdom
  • Since 2000

Founded in 2000 as one of the first online golf stores in the UK, GolfOnline has since grown into one of Europe’s largest stockists of top-branded golf equipment.

To keep up with the business’s rapid expansion across Europe, the GolfOnline marketing team needed to scale their ability to leverage data, drive customer engagement, and strengthen customer loyalty.

The Challenge

  • Segmenting based on customer attributes
  • Growing customer loyalty
  • Transform data into actionable insights
  • Capitalizing on purchase momentum
  • Optimizing results throughout the customer journey

With more customers and regions to serve, the GolfOnline marketing team needed to invest more time in differentiating between their different customer types. They lacked effective methods for separating the different types of customers in their rapidly expanding contact database, which hindered their ability to create and deliver personalized interactions at scale.

Challenges arose when GolfOnline observed that peaks in customer growth failed to produce sustainable revenue streams, indicating that customers only made one or two purchases before becoming inactive. To address this issue, the brand needed a solution to identify customers most likely to return, automate content execution to encourage repeat purchases, and grow active customers.

While the retailer had past success using post-purchase follow-ups, they struggled to match product recommendations with customers as they quickly expanded into new markets. In order to ensure excellent customer experiences across every different journey, they needed a solution to automate 1:1 personalization throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

“Smart Insight has helped us to highlight the different personas in our database, as well as their product affinities. The information allowed us to build better campaigns, which has, in turn, improved our long-term engagement rates.”
Icon of a generic user silhouette in blue centered on a circular light gray background.
Rumit Patani,
Marketing Director, GolfOnline

The Solution

With data consolidated, GolfOnline was able to lay the foundation for a new marketing strategy. The powerful segmentation and programmatic automation capabilities of the SAP Emarsys platform highlighted critical customer attributes. Empowered with these insights, the GolfOnline marketing team could deliver relevant, tailored experiences to each customer.

Graph displaying total revenue from contacts over time categorized by lifecycle stages. Additional panel shows contact attribution details.
Driving relevancy with intelligent segmentation
Flowchart illustrating a Win-Back Cross Channel Journey next to a mobile screen depicting a golf advertisement with a discount code offer.
Automating win-back to increase retention

The Impact

The SAP Emarsys platform transformed the GolfOnline contact database into an information-rich cornerstone of their 1:1 engagement automation strategy.

+26% increase in year-on-year revenue
+16% uplift from Post-Purchase automation
+160% uplift from Defective Buyer win-back automation
+80% uplift from a single 3-stage Welcome campaign
410,000+ emails sent per month
Dashboard displaying revenue analytics. Graph shows revenue trends. Text: Total revenue $144k

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