The Business
Mizuno Corporation, founded in Osaka, Japan in 1906, is an industry leader in sporting goods and apparel, spreading the value of sports in everyday life. The brand promotes sports culture around the globe. Mizuno is committed to achieving a sustainable society and making people around the world happy through the power of sports.
The Challenge
Because the Mizuno USA business model is primarily B2B, the brand found that it was lacking control over audience engagement. The marketing team felt that they were missing out on opportunities to better understand their customers.
Marketing for Mizuno USA also comes with a great deal of complexity: not only does Mizuno sell goods and apparel for ten product categories (in the US) with different seasons, but the brand also sells both online and via wholesale partners. It’s vital that Mizuno delivers consistent messages across the entire omnichannel customer journey, while also targeting the right customers with relevant products at the right time of year.
Sending a message about golf clubs in winter would create a jarring customer experience. On the other hand, running can be done year-round if the customer does indoor training. It’s essential for Mizuno to be able to engage whenever customers are likely to be shopping for the product that they need.
Delivering such highly targeted messaging across channels (including web, social, and email) requires deep insights into their customer preferences and behaviors.
The brand also was looking for a solution that would help them establish long-term loyalty, driving new sign-ups for their loyalty program and making the process seamless for customers.
The Solution
Mizuno partnered with SAP Emarsys to expand their marketing strategies and build direct relationships with customers, while at the same time gathering rich first-party data and creating unified customer profiles. Using sophisticated omnichannel engagement capabilities, Mizuno is creating more targeted and engaging campaigns for their sports fans.
Delivering omnichannel experiences for a complete customer journey
Mizuno is omnichannel conscious — they’re mindful that their customers are hopping from web to social media to email and back again. Additionally, because some of their products are in the higher price range and many sports are seasonal in nature, Mizuno relies on SAP Emarsys to be able to deliver consistent messages about promotions across channels. SAP Emarsys helps by unifying data, including web browser history, purchase history, web clicks, and more, all to help craft more relevant messages.
According to Lisa Fair, Growth Marketing Specialist at Mizuno, “SAP Emarsys has helped enhance our ability to target users browsing our site. When they go to different categories, we know what they’re interested in, and we can personalize each email to those consumers with the category-based targeting that SAP Emarsys offers.”
So, for example, even if the customer saw an email promotion and wasn’t ready to buy yet, a website pop-up or a social ad can remind them about that same promotion. This consistent omnichannel messaging raising the promotion in the customer’s awareness helps them to more easily purchase when they’re ready, creating a seamless experience.
"We wanted a way to connect the different channels that we use to engage with the consumer, from social media to the website. What I love about SAP Emarsys is that it helped us unify the data, like browser history, purchases, clicks, and more, on all those different channels so we can make a more personalized experience, which is what drives real loyalty for us."
Growing first-party data at scale
With SAP Emarsys, Mizuno has clear visibility into customer behavior on their website, such as how much time they’re spending on pages, which consumers are visiting, and who’s making purchases. The brand has clear insights into which divisions have the highest engagement rates, namely running and golf.
To continue growing other divisions, Mizuno delivered personalized messages at scale to promote recent launches not just for running and golf but also soccer and sportstyle. These newer divisions are showing strong growth in web traffic and purchases.
"When customers are on the website, we’re able to use SAP Emarsys to better understand how they’re engaging with our content and what their journey with us looks like, which is great. What we want to work on next is when they go to the website, they’ll have a web channel pop-up that lets them customize their experience and tell us what they want."
Driving more efficient and effective marketing automation
Creating automated customer journeys from scratch could be a daunting task, but by using the pre-built tactics available in SAP Emarsys, the marketing team is able to quickly launch new campaigns, such as an abandoned cart campaign, which they’ve been continually optimizing. Automations help drive peak season engagement, such as Cyber Monday reminders that follow up on unopened emails. Pre-built tactics empower brands like Mizuno to create complete campaigns in days, not weeks.
Mizuno has also worked closely with the SAP Emarsys services team to create more effective automations and engaging email template designs that fit their specific business needs, with recommendations for enhanced personalization. By helping Mizuno break down their complex use cases (which span ten product categories and all seasons), SAP Emarsys services made it possible to go beyond everyday engagement to deliver industry-tailored engagement. Lisa Fair commented, “When creating a campaign in SAP Emarsys, we have a pre-built template that I get to drag and drop in content to create different emails that I want for each business division. It makes it so much faster to drag different personalization tokens and content modules into the campaign.”
"With SAP Emarsys, what I love is that they have pre-built automations, which make my job so much easier, and they make it clear what to do next as well. We started with the abandoned cart and continued from there."
Building relationships through progressive profiling
To better nurture the customer relationship, Mizuno used SAP Emarsys to launch an automated Welcome series. The goal of this campaign is develop that relationship from the start, helping customers understand what makes Mizuno the brand to rely on for all their sporting needs. It’s also about getting to know the customers on a deeper level.
By creating a multi-part Welcome series, Mizuno has focused on getting to know the customers’ interests, where they’re located, and other demographic insights. By spreading the questions over multiple touchpoints in the campaign, the brand is able to use progressive profiling to gradually learn about their customers, rather than overwhelming them with too many questions all at once.
These customer insights, collected over time, then become the fuel to power personalization throughout the customer journey, so Mizuno can deliver more relevant, targeted messages that satisfy the customer and win their long-lasting loyalty.
“Acquisition is great,” said Lisa, “but we want to really retain the customers and build that loyalty, which is what creates the highest average order and the most engaged audience we have.”
Rewarding loyalty seamlessly across business divisions
To drive ongoing engagement with their customers, Mizuno uses a loyalty program, MVP Rewards, which enables the brand to gather more insights about customers and also reward them for purchases. Not only do customers get points for purchases, but they also receive access to exclusive promotions before anyone else. Mizuno has found that this exclusivity factor helps drive loyalty program sign-ups.
Automated loyalty campaign messages include welcoming customers to the program, reaching out when points are about to expire, emails about program benchmarks that can earn rewards, as well as other customer engagement touchpoints throughout their loyalty journey.
The loyalty program spans Mizuno’s entire line of products, so when someone who’s a fan of their running shoes starts playing, say, golf or racquetball, the rewards and loyalty history carry over. This creates a frictionless experience for the customer as their interests change over seasons or even years.
The Impact
The consumer products industry is continuing to evolve at a rapid pace as consumer buying behaviors change and their expectations for personalized engagement continue to rise. Mizuno is at the forefront of digital transformation as they build direct engagement with consumers into their overall strategy. With the help of SAP Emarsys, Mizuno has been able to be more in control of the consumer experience and also engage with them more directly to tell the story of what makes the brand valuable.
Through SAP Emarsys analytics, Mizuno was able to identify that MVP Rewards loyalty members have a larger average order spend than non-loyalty members. Additionally, loyalty members are more likely to be returning customers, thus helping the team target their marketing efforts most effectively.
“SAP Emarsys is helping us get to know the consumer, and data is the key to that understanding. The better the data we’re able to collect and leverage, the better the personalization experience, which drives deeper, long-lasting customer loyalty.”