Video Transcript

– [Leigh] Hello everyone. My name is Leigh Noy and I’m from the Strategic Services team here in Optimove. I’d like to invite Oskar Kerola to the stage. Oskar is the head of CRM at Nelly, a leading online retailer in the Nordic countries. He’s come all the way here from Stockholm to present a case study of the work we’ve done with Nelly.

– [Oskar] Thank you for inviting me here, Leigh and thank you Optimove for inviting me to beautiful Tel Aviv. I really much enjoyed it so far and the day has been great so far so thank you.

– Oskar, can you please introduce yourself?

– Yeah of course. I’m Oskar from Sweden and basically I’m pretty much of a sporty guy so I like to compete and I think that is a good quality to have in business as well. I’ve been at Nelly for five years. I started off doing economics also as a controller mostly for purchasing but now I’m at the marketing department and CRM manager since a bit more than year. I’m leading the development we’re doing there and trying to reach out to more of our customers that we do see. Yeah, that’s basically it about me.

The Success of Nelly as an Online Retail Group

– For people in the audience that aren’t familiar with your brand, can you please tell us a little bit about your company, about Nelly?

– Yeah. So Nelly, we’re the major fashion destination in the Nordic Region in Scandinavia. We’re selling women’s clothing mostly to women between 16 and 27 years of age. We’re also selling menswear and we do have our shopping club called Members. We’re a retailing company and our turnover last year was about 200 million dollars and since I got to the company five years ago we have increased sales from about 30 million dollars so we have been on quite a journey and right now we’re at the moment where sort of the market in Scandinavia has been quite… We have penetrated it quite good so we have about 50% of young girls between 16 and 27 that actually have made an order at Nelly. We’re going from acquiring customers into the CRM part of things. It’s getting more and more important to us. That’s Nelly and we’re also part of a group called the Qliro Group and they’re part of a company called Kinnevik which also holds stakes in big companies like Zalando from Germany so they’re a big competitor. We’re basically an online retail group.

Defining the Young Millennial Customer

– Let’s talk about audience. Can you describe the Nelly customer profile? Who is your customer persona?

– We definitely have an engaged customer. The Nelly girl, the typical Nelly girl she’s young and outgoing and likes to party so naturally we’re selling party dresses as our major product category. Our customers are following a lot of influencers on social media so we need to take that into consideration during our marketing so affiliate marketing is a big part of our marketing strategy, but naturally we’re doing all the classic channels as well. Since the industry also is turning into more and more fast fashion we need to be up to speed with following the trends not only with the product but also with the marketing. That’s where we are at.

– That sounds like a typical millennial. For this generation loyalty is long dead. What are the challenges that you encounter when you engage this type of customers?

Staying Relevant with Customized Communication

– As you said things are getting more and more competitive on the market and as a CRM manager it’s good to be competitive as I initially said because we need to fight for our customers especially the fashion industry being very competitive with new up and comers. We do have a lot of big brands out there. What our major… The major challenge for us is to stay relevant in every communication all the time to our customer. We do have our big campaign schemes so to speak where we’re planning week by week, we’re following the seasonal trends. But we definitely are investing more in the CRM strategy where we do a lot of this customized communication to the people. We need to stay relevant in every part of that because as an important note there is that if we keep on repeating irrelevant messaging to our customers we are seeing that they’re losing interest and we don’t have… We cannot do that really. We need to stay relevant all the time.

Leveraging Optimove as a Marketing Analysis Tool

– Can I assume that’s the reason you decided to start working with Optimove? Let me rephrase. You’ve been working with Optimove now for the past three years. Back in the day, what led you guys to choose Optimove and start working with us?

– I wasn’t in the process when we started to work with Optimove since it’s three years ago but I know for fact that we were looking for a business partner that provided a 360 solution for being able to provide a good analyzation tools and we wanted a marketing hub where we could steer all our campaigns through one hub. Optimove definitely gave that ability to us. That’s where we started off. It’s a good fit and also you guys are providing professional services as a part of your team. We are still much in contact and that’s also an important thing for us to get the expertise from outside and from your side of things. Optimove is a good fit for Nelly.

Targeted Marketing Strategy for Customer Retention

– Thank you. I’ll take that as a complement. Inevitable to ask, how did using Optimove change the way Nelly communicates with its customers? How did it change your retention efforts generally?

– Yeah, so looking a couple of years back, we were mostly doing the big blasts kind of communication to our customers. We were sending emails to all our customer in our database. We have definitely turned more into creating smaller target groups. Just looking a year back we now are having 10 times more unique target groups where I think 50 percent of them are less than 500 customers. So we are in this sort of a journey where we are adapting more and more strategies and more and more unique campaigns all the time. Optimove is a great tool in providing where you… Providing the analysis of where we need to focus and also, as I said, your team from the strategic service you’re helping us pointing out where to take the actions and yeah that’s great. Since Nelly is employing about 350 employees so we’re pretty big but we are up and rising so we don’t have a whole big team working with this so it’s great that you guys are helping us out with it.

Customer Engagement Strategies and Marketing to Millennials

– Thank you. You mentioned some stats which sounded amazing. I’m convinced they indicate a paradigm shift. Nelly basically became a customer centric per se. Can your day-to-day with Optimove reflect this shift? What does it normally look like the process that you do? Your day to day with Optimove.

– We are reaching about 12 million unique customers. No, sorry I’m wrong there. We are having 12 million contacts with our customers each week. What we’re doing with all these communication is basically testing and analyzing new campaigns all the time. There is definitely a big trial and error part of this where I think somebody has told earlier you are going to fail a lot of the time in the campaigns and you need to tweak the messaging all the time. It’s a constant process of doing that. You learn more and more each week of what customers are engaged by. We definitely see that. If we’re creating more engaging material, we don’t have to give our customers as much discount to get the results we’re looking at. We are producing all material in house for marketing and that’s a big part of it to be able to tweak messaging and to try different content and just to learn what the customers are engaged by. Also we are definitely realizing that the omni channel experience for the customers is paying off so what we’re trying to do is we try create the whole sort of journey when a customer get to campaign where we’re for example sending an email. I can take an example of campaign we’re running where we’re selling both in house brands at Nelly and also external brands but we have been seeing that we get the most lifetime value out of customer when they’re buying both the in house brands and external brands. We have adopted some campaigns where if a customer in their first purchase have only purchased external brands we give them the offer to buy our product labels, our in house brand on a good discount. We send them the email on that and then if they’re not responding to that email a couple of days later we are having them in a target group where we are sending them to Facebook and we’re following up on the initial contact. We have them in that Facebook target group for a couple of days and if we’re not seeing their responding on that we can go ahead and do an SMS text messaging, push, if we’re feeling that it’s relevant for that campaign. We’re also looking to… We are to integrate the real time triggers on site that you guys have provided. We’re also developing our app and so the personal notification through the app is definitely also going to be a good way for us to communicate and to follow up on these campaigns steps all the way so yeah.

Success of Marketing Automation Strategies

– Could you share a few of your success matrix with us? The ones you’ve achieved as a customer centric brand?

– Yeah so we are seeing from all campaigns we’re running in total in Optimove, we’re seeing about a million dollar uplift actually each month from the campaigns we’re measuring so that’s a major part of it. Not all of these campaigns are automated but a lot of them are so we’re seeing that the effort we’re doing definitely are paying off. Also we’re getting about 75% customer coverage by the campaigns we’re running. We could get that to the high number but we want to make sure not to waste our money on customers that had lapsed too much. Optimove is definitely providing the opportunity to reach all customers and now I’m speaking especially via Facebook marketing and Instagram marketing. We’re pretty happy about that number and we’re having about 75% automated campaigns at the moment. Also looking at Facebook itself, we have, thanks to Optimove and thanks to the different customer life–cycle stages we have been able to decrease our costs for…sorry, we have increased our return on investment for customers in Optimove and we have decreased our cost per click actually on Facebook with about 20% year to date this year compared to last year. Since we’re having different bidding strategies through different customer life–cycle stages in Facebook we can manage to choose to spend more on the customers we want and the dump we can choose not to spend any money on. That’s really working out good for us. The same goes for marketing via AdWords and the search… We use Optimove as a tool to upload customer target groups into AdWords search marketing so we can apply different bidding strategies there as well. All in all well it’s helping us to optimize our marketing plan throughout our different channels. Not only just having the automated recurring campaigns.

CRM Results with Optimove

– Those numbers are very impressive. Obviously it takes a very good CRM team to get these results with Optimove. Let me ask you a more general question. What do you think makes a good driver? What is necessary for a CRM manager in order to succeed?

– You definitely need to be eager to test and keep on measuring and look for new facts to reconsider. Since it’s a constant process of evolving this side of the business for us. You need to keep on track and always be sure that you are trying to get some kind of an output for each campaign. So yeah it’s a constant process there. Also look for external help, that has been working out good for us to work with you guys in the services team since I guess there are many businesses here as well that are like us. You’re in the growing phase and not everybody has the same kind of resources to have a huge CRM team so in that way it’s very much good to get help from you guys. Especially what you need to do is you need to keep a good helicopter view of things. We are measuring how much sales we’re getting through our different customer lifecycles stages. In our budgeting process we actually break it down to how many reactivations from the churn customers do we need to get each month for each market. For instance if we’re seeing that we are dropping numbers in Denmark in reactivations we can take actions on those segments and do pushes and invest more marketing money on those customers. If you go by that sort of a helicopter view from the start it’s much more easier to dig down deep in every branch of your customers to take actions, so yeah that’s some of the things you can consider as working with a CRM.

Advice for Optimove Users

– Well thank you. Just to wrap things up before we take a few questions from the audience. What are your words of wisdom to the Optimove users? What’s your advice for Optimove drivers?

– Yeah so as I said definitely to keep on trying. Keep on pushing things. Expect to do some errors and not be afraid of… That’s the way to go to success, you cannot be afraid of making any mistakes. Also I would like to just briefly note about the fact of giving Optimove the right data from the beginning so you definitely need a good tech setup from start for you guys to be able to do what your best in analyzing that sort of data. Before moving ahead and integrating fully with Optimove make sure that you definitely get everything in the information that you want to be able to analyze later on. That would some of the words for a good CRM driver.

– Great. Thank you. Does anyone in the audience have any questions for Oskar? Let me just repeat the question.

Advertising Tools for a Successful Millennial Marketing Strategy

– The question was if Nelly uses any other platforms in order to advertise?

– Yeah exactly, like Facebook for instance or Google AdWords. We are using Optimove to create the target groups that will later on create audiences, yeah and we upload them to AdWords exactly. Also the same thing for Facebook where we’re using the tools provided where we can have automated target groups uploaded to Facebook business manager. And there we can choose in those tools which kind of bid we want to give to an active customer. We can put a lower bid on a customer where we’re not expecting that customer to buy. In that way we’re trying to optimize our marketing spend throughout every channel. Same goes for AdWords as well and now in the latest release, Optimove made it possible to upload your target groups to the Google Display Network and we haven’t integrated that yet. Yeah, Google Display Network, yeah. We will be able to have the same kind of strategy in… spending money on display.

– Okay. Well thank you very much, Oskar. And thank you guys for listening.