The Business
AO is the UK’s most trusted electrical retailer, and customer satisfaction is at the heart of everything they do as a business and a CRM team. From their logo to their communications, it is all to make their customers smile! Their range of products is constantly expanding, as are the content and tools they produce to help their customers choose the right products. With such a fast-growing pace, AO needed both a product and services team that could support their ambitions to reach their customers effectively and at scale. Together, we analyzed how to better engage their customers and maximize profitability.
The Challenge
- Growing 1st Party database
- Customer Reactivation
- Content Engagement
- Increase Product Relevance
AO faced 4 key challenges, including growing its first-party database, ensuring content was both engaging and products communicated were relevant despite their broad range, and reactivating dormant customers with limited data. The overarching objective was to become the UK’s leading choice for electricals beyond just price competitiveness. To achieve this profitably, AO needed to engage both first-time and returning buyers during lengthy sales cycles, with a focus on building trust, authority, and loyalty.
“We have a really good partnership with Emarsys over the last 4 or 5 years, which has really allowed us to challenge ourselves and delve into our key issues and problem areas within our email and CRM channels. Our overall message, which you’ll see across all AO marketing, is that we are the UK’s most trusted electrical retailer. We pride ourselves on being really customer-focused and having the best customer journey within our industry.”
The Solution
Working with Emarsys Services, AO devised a comprehensive solution to address loyalty and retention challenges that led to impressive outcomes including a substantial increase in newsletter engagement and significant automated revenue. The key components of the solution included:
Lead generation powered by Web Channel
A Strategic Data Audit led AO to launch a sign-up campaign that capitalized on site traffic from their PPC investments to grow its database and give new contacts a warm welcome to the brand. This improved the efficiency of acquisition and retargeting and was particularly pressing in the era of evolving data privacy regulations.
Beating the competition scaled with automation
From Customer Journey Mapping to automation and campaign build, the teams collaborated to optimise customer-centric omni-channel journeys that delivered beyond customer expectations at sign up, ensuring the right product, expert advice and deal reached subscribers at the optimal time to engage and convert.
Call-To-Action with an email template toolbox
Emarsys Studio Creative Consultancy closely collaborated with AO’s creative and CRM teams to put customer consideration and call to action at the heart of the campaign when optimising AO’s email work process and email templates. The result achieved omni-channel consistency, adoption of personalization opportunities, and unlocked new interactive template capabilities, such as promoting social proof and price range, product features and progressive profiling of customers dynamic shopping missions. This gave the AO team the ability to create customer-oriented and on-brand content, with elevated storytelling and relevancy.
The Impact
The close collaboration between AO and Emarsys Services aligned the CRM team’s digital efforts with the goal of first-party database growth for customer retention. AO’s dedication to expanding their reach and delivering highly relevant communications contributed to outstanding results including increased database growth, higher engagement, increased revenue and greater average order value.
Strategic Data Audit to Inform Enrichment Strategy and Customer Relevancy
Pop up, embedded or ribbon WEBCHANNEL+ templates were informed by AO’s strategy and built by Emarsys Studio Services to deliver intelligent lead data capture– capturing additional insights into customers reason for visiting the site.
Customer Journey Mapping to Execute Effective Automated Interactions
Automated campaigns were strategically designed with Emarsys Strategic Services to cater to AO’s specific journeys. These campaigns engaged customers across multiple channels at different stages of their buying journey, effectively reactivating dormant customers, boosting engagement and conversion.
Creative Consultancy to Deliver Product Storytelling and Relevancy
The Emarsys Studio team used their template consultancy expertise to elevate the omni-channel experience and product recommendations to deliver the most relevant moments in the customers’ inbox. AO’s priority was to provide their customers with the most relevant product information to help a customer make a purchasing decision.
Creative Consultancy to Drive Interactivity
With 2024 marking the start of depreciating third party cookies, AO needed a strategy to grow first party data. Email played an important role in driving site traffic to keep this data as up to date and relevant as possible. Building email interactivity into their strategy and enabling this in a template was crucial to their success.
“Most channels are falling behind but email is hitting above and beyond on targets (revenue and click-through). I don’t think we’d be able to hit these if we hadn’t done this piece of work [with Emarsys Services]”
