CRM-manager Arjen Veerman on Blokker’s digital transformation

Email has a relatively high online conversion rate. But it also offers a great opportunity to get customers into your stores. There are many methods to motivate people to visit brick-and-mortar stores. Blokker uses tv commercials and flyers, but CRM manager Arjen Veerman is looking to deploy digital tools to get more traffic into stores. “At the moment, we create visibility with tv commercials and flyers, but that’s expensive. We would also like to reach a younger audience, which is harder to do with flyers.”

“The percentage of people 55 and older that reads our flyers is significantly higher than those from younger age groups. To reach those, we need to look at other channels, such as email marketing”. This digital transformation is achieved with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Email Studio and Journey Builder are especially important tools for Blokker’s marketing team. “We use Marketing Cloud to segment and send all our campaigns, but we also use it as a database for customer information, to see when a customer last opened an email and how he interacted with it. By connecting this data with order history, we are building a complete profile of our customers”.

Automated campaigns

Together with Sanoma, publisher of the magazine ‘Ouders van Nu’, Blokker found another way to reach a younger audience and get more people into stores. Pregnant women who register for a pregnancy and new parents giftbox online -to be collected in a Blokker store of their choice- can also opt-in to the Blokker newsletter for a chance to win a baby monitor.

“The data we collect this way is very valuable”, Veerman explains. “We use it in the Journey Builder tool in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to set up a fully automated email campaign. This audience recieves an email at key moments during pregnancy and after, highlighting relevant Blokker products. For instance: When the child starts eating solid foods at 12 weeks, we will send an email offering food containers and other useful products. This will generate interest in our new range of baby products. We will also use the data to segment our newsletter audience and create more relevant emails.”

Rewarding loyal customers

To make 1-to-1 communication even more relevant, Veerman is using a modified RFM model. This model isn’t based on web-orders, but on engagement. “Our goal is not getting customers to order more online, but to dicover who is loyal to our brand. We know the newsletter is very well-read. This is a good indicator for the number of people that engages with Blokker. Those are the loyal customers we would like to reward.

Additionally, we want to trigger our less active customers, by offering them a discount voucher, for example. People are driven by discounts and customers appeciate a gift.

Personalised discounts in an app

Although email campaigns trigger store visits, this effect cannot be measured exactly. Veerman thinks this is unfortunate. “The challenge we face is identifying our customers in the stores. We cannot measure if a customer visits a store because of a newsletter we sent. We use Google Store Visit, but that cannot identify individual visitors.

That is why we will be launching an app for personal discounts that can only be redeemed in a store. This way, we can see who visits which store to claim their discount. When they visit, we can give them additional information about our instore online ordering and click-and-collect services. We don’t see online and offline as separate, we want to create a synergy between the webshop and the store.”

Read more about what CloseContact does for Blokker in our case.

 

Text BBP Media | Image Zuiver Beeld
This article also appeared in MarketingTribune