Groupe SEB, the world's largest manufacturer of cookware and maker of small domestic appliances, had to go back to the kitchen. For Groupe SEB UK specifically, early in the pandemic, traditional brick- and-mortar retail sales were slowing due to non-essential retail closures, which meant consumer demand shifted online faster than ever seen before. The market remained very dynamic, driven by heightened consumer demand of cookware and cooking appliances as more time was being spent at home. The team identified that finding more efficiencies for its digital D2C (direct-to-consumer) platform could meet this shifting consumer behavior and support overall sales of the business.

As CRM Manager at Groupe SEB, Alex Moulsley oversees the digital customer journey as part of his remit. Moulsley says, “Traditionally, our business has been very retail-focused, so most of our selling has been through retail partners; however, the last 18 months have boosted our complementary sales channels. The pandemic has been the driver for us, with our online, direct-to-consumer business growing rapidly. Our customers actively want to shop with us, engage with us and our brands directly, and want to transact with us. We've had to consider how to grow and continue to develop in a space where the demand is put directly on us by consumers, while also maintaining our core retail relationships."

"Another big consideration for us is how do we remain relevant in a space that's increasingly noisy in email and driven by privacy? We're not a fashion retailer, selling maybe 10 times a year. For us, it might be one or two times a year. We're taking a step back and redefining the value exchange. Do we define it as a sale on our platform? Or can we open that up with a post-purchase automation to someone who has consumed a piece of content? Is that interaction with us just as valuable as a sale? We strongly believe that value of our consumer is beyond sales; we’re focused on ensuring customer loyalty, strengthening customer engagement, and building customer affinity for our brand."

Groupe SEB is keeping an eye on the long term — looking at the consumer's lifetime value and planning to engage with that consumer across their entire lifecycle.

Groupe SEB works with Purple Square and uses Acoustic Campaign, which has enabled it to quickly adapt and meet ever-growing consumer expectations and needs. Moulsley reports, "To start with, we're partnering with Services to automate the offers we send out. In the past, we were spending a lot of time setting up multiple email campaigns. We now have the ability to set it all up in one automation. So, we've gained a huge amount of efficiency time on the operational side of delivering those campaigns. But, also, [Acoustic Campaign] makes the reporting completely seamless for us, and that's something we really value because we want to make decisions as much as possible on the data available to us."

"We're also focusing a lot more on engaging segments of our database. In the past, we might have been sending to all of our opt-ins — just because we could. We thought, at the time, that that's the right thing to do — we have all this data, we want to speak to everybody. But now, we've seen the efficiency we gain in deliverability: better inbox placement and our ability to focus in on engaged users. And that engagement can come in multiple forms. Traditionally, we looked at open rates, but now we look at other engagement metrics like read length and email insights, or wherever there's been a click, or if there's a purchase made in a specific time period. We have to open up exactly what that engagement looks like."

"We've worked quite hard to optimize our welcome journeys, with an additional reminder for people to sign up. Some get the first email, but they don't check their inbox to sign up. We've now started sending a reminder, that is alleviating any of the drop-off we had. One-third of the signups we were getting from pop-ups on our brand site were dropping off after their initial sign-up. Adding this extra reminder is helping us capture opt-ins."

"The really big one for us is the data integration with our direct-to-consumer platform online. We've got all our transactional data synching into Acoustic Campaign now, into relational tables. There is a huge wealth of information that we can base automation on, understand our customers more, figure out exactly where they're shopping, and why. The potential for using data to strengthen our interactions with customers and create communications and experiences that reinforce customer loyalty is exciting.”

Moulsley sees this enabling his team to build 360-degree profiles to better reach customers and personalize their experience across channels, possibly including mobile or SMS. "It's given us the opportunity to shift what we were doing in the past because that was the limit of what we could do. But now we have the transactional data and shopping information. That opens the door for a lot of exciting programs."

Moulsley notes, "We use CRM actually outside of CRM. We use social audiences to segment our database, and send those audiences to Facebook, or into Google ads for paid search. And what we can do now makes our media spend really, really efficient. For example, if we're running an ad on a product and we know that person already owns the product, we can exclude them from the campaign and not show them the latest offer. They wouldn't find it useful, and it would needlessly cost us money. This also gives us the opportunity to create look-alike targeting. We can take a segment of our data where we know exactly who owns this product, and then we reach out to people who look the same."

Asked what advice he'd give other marketers, Moulsley said they should "Work with Acoustic, utilizing their professional services, because the people I work with on a weekly basis have really been the driving force and shift in our approach to CRM marketing. Secondly, make full use of message composer, the drag-and-drop message builder newly launched in Acoustic Campaign. We're now in beta and will be ready to use composer in totality for all of our email campaigns. That has been a game changer for us — for a small team, who values time and needs a simple way to build emails and creatives as quickly and efficiently as possible. Message composer is a kind of the holy grail for us: to be able to deliver our campaigns really quickly and effectively and be responsive."