October has been a great month for the Merkle Australia team.
One achievement we are particularly excited about is being recognised by Salesforce as APAC Implementation Partner of the Year for our work with Seafolly.
The Implementation Partner Awards recognise agencies who have delivered a significant impact to a client and solved a unique customer challenge using Salesforce capabilities.
Working closely with Salesforce, we’re continuously helping businesses unlock greater success and accelerate their business transformation – leaning into whatever challenge or opportunity that comes our way.
Seafolly is one of Australia’s greatest and most well-known swimwear brands. In the lead up to Australia’s summer, we were able to help their team identify the key stages of decision-making and channels their customers were engaging with most, and then craft deeply personalised communications to grow customer loyalty.
It’s so rewarding when we work on a project that genuinely delivers transforming results for a business.
For this project, Caroline Swarbrick, previously Chief Digital Officer at Seafolly, told us: "By bringing in Salesforce and giving agents the ability to manage everything from one screen, we have been able to reduce our average response time by half. We have customers calling up to ask for our team by name and enjoying the 1:1 service. It is also much easier to onboard new team members with a single view and clear history of each customer"
So, what was the project? Let’s take a look.
The Beach Club
With customers’ impression of Seafolly as a swimwear only ‘summer’ brand, there was a need to establish a loyalty program to reduce seasonality of purchasing behaviour and improve customer experience.
This program was named ‘The Beach Club’.
Using a range of Salesforce capabilities, we worked with Seafolly’s marketing team to create a program spanning across offline (bricks-and-mortar retail stores) and eCommerce purchasing.
Bringing it to life
As part of this, it was important to create more meaningful segmentation capabilities based on loyalty metrics to enable targeted email and SMS campaigns.
We leveraged a multi-cloud environment, including Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Seafolly’s existing ERP and integration platform, FusionFactory.
We implemented the AppExchange product DESelect to enable Seafolly to utilise complex relational loyalty data without having to write code, which reduced reliance on external partners and increased efficiency of campaign deployment.
Using Automation Studio and SQL Query, we built out an audience retargeting strategy based on past purchase behaviour, actively engaged audiences, regional audiences, and SMS audiences. The use of these segments allowed more targeted messaging around fashion sales, in-store events and other events to more specific members.
And finally, Content Builder was used to enable custom built templates to ensure branding and personalisation were consistent. We embedded a custom preference centre in Cloud Pages so Seafolly customers could update their preferences in Salesforce CRM directly and reflect their privacy and consent settings and status changes immediately. The use of Journey Builder enabled Seafolly to automate a series of loyalty-based communications designed for specific audiences throughout the customer lifecycle.
The results
The end game here was to build customer loyalty, stabilise purchasing behaviour and increase spend per customer. I’m proud to say we were able to achieve this, and more.
Through The Beach Club, we helped deliver:
- 184% increase in conversion rate
- 200% increase in the average number of member purchases per year
- 11% increase in reward redemption rate
- 20% increase in average spend per member
- 50% decrease in service team response rate
If you’re interested in knowing more about this project, or are kick starting your own business transformation ahead of 2021, our team would be more than happy to chat about what’s possible.
