L’Occitane and Vente-Privee.com Use Unified Customer Experience to Succeed

For a long time, marketing was based on company structure and marketing channels rather than the customers that the campaigns were addressing. Marketing messages delivered via the Web to different customers were the same, but they were different from the messages sent to the same customers via email.

In this post, I present how L’Occitane and Vente-privee.com used Adobe Marketing Cloud to build one-to-one customer relationships, helping them to break their channel silos and personalize their messages by client, which showed a profound effect on brand success. As L’Occitane’s CWE digital & international CRM director, Mathieu Staat says, “We’ve got one customer. And if he calls, or he goes in the store, or goes on the Web, or uses the mobile app, he’s the same customer. So we wanted to break the silos across departments.”

L’Occitane Improves Customer Experience and Wins Big

L’Occitane is no stranger to marketing. They have over 6,000 points of sale as well as revenue of more than a billion Euros from operations in more than 90 countries. Still, when digital sales became a crucial additional channel beyond its stores, L’Occitane recognized it needed a 360 degree view of its customers in order to coordinate its online and offline marketing into an effective, personalized campaign. Such a complete view would allow the brand to create a one-to-one relationship with each customer, optimizing his or her buying experience and maximizing lifetime purchases.

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Using Adobe Campaign allowed L’Occitane to do exactly that by globally delivering cross-channel messaging that coordinates email, SMS, and even offline direct mail through a single solution. Using a relational program, L’Occitane creates regular, personalized campaigns that resonate with its customers, maximizing repeat purchases. These campaigns don’t always include an immediate CTA to generate purchases. Sometimes they may say something as simple as “Thank you for buying from us,” targeted at building relationships and reinforcing brand loyalty and credibility. Other campaigns reach out to customers through emails that are timed to hit when a previous purchase is probably close to its end of life or depletion, encouraging repeat purchases. After all, a customer satisfied with a prior purchase and his or her relationship with the brand requires little persuasion beyond a reminder.

By soliciting customer reviews, whether positive or negative, L’Occitane opened lines of communication. Adding special offers to reviewers generated a huge response, with an unprecedented number of reviews being left on the company’s French website.

As mentioned in my post on negative reviews providing an engagement opportunity, L’Occitane actively seeks to reengage customers who leave negative reviews and resolve their concerns. This turns dissatisfied customers into happy, loyal brand ambassadors.

The results were not long in coming. An open rate increase of more than 30 percent, a tenfold increase in revenue per open, and a four times higher conversion rate compared to standard campaigns.

Vente-Privee.com Sends Billions of Personalized Emails Annually with Great Results

Vente-privee.com is a French e-commerce company with 20 million online members. The company sends out over 7 billion emails per year, which are responsible for more than 1.6 billion Euros in annual revenue.

The company uses Adobe Campaign to make sure they send the right email to the right customer each time. As co-founder Ilan Benhaim says, “We see the customer as the centre of our entire business… Emails are the key to generating business. Adobe Campaign helped us to address the issue of volume, but always with the ability for personalization, which is a huge challenge.”

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Adobe Campaign lets the company access each customer’s profile in real time, so they can offer the right product at the right time for each individual customer, all while controlling costs. Not only does Vente-privee.com send out 20 million fully personalized emails daily, but they can also easily conduct A/B tests to continuously tweak and optimize their messaging. The more personalized those emails are, the happier the members are, and the more revenue flows to the company.

Takeaway

The most successful brands know that marketing has to be based on a win for each customer. This means that in the optimal situation, each customer receives exactly the offer he needs and wants at the very moment he can use it. As Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, says, “We will continue to adhere to the principle of customers first, employees second, shareholders third.”

Whether through a 360 degree view of each customer, as L’Occitane does it, or through hyper-personalized email campaigns, à la Vente-privee.com, companies can use Adobe Campaign to break silos, centering their marketing messaging on each and every individual customer’s needs and wants, rather than on the company’s organizational or marketing structure.

The world of commerce is being revolutionized right in front of our eyes. We see search and advertising giant, Google, building stores; the world’s largest e-commerce company, Alibaba, working its magic with zero inventory; Amazon testing the possibility of drone-based same-day delivery; Uber disrupting the paid-rides industry throughout the world; and more. Business is moving faster and faster. Only the most innovative companies will survive and thrive. Brands such as L’Occitane and Vente-privee.com are doing whatever it takes to make sure they’re among those left standing. To learn more about these two customer cases, view a pair of visual animation microsites via this portal.

Does your brand use customer-centric marketing? If not, do you see this as your brand’s path to improved results?