wehkamp.nl targeted emails engage customers and increase loyalty

Email marketing dynamics are changing rapidly. This change is characterized by the ability of companies to maintain contextually relevant conversations with customers and hence drive substantial value back to the business.

At wehkamp.nl, the Netherlands’ largest online retailer, marketers have successfully woven relevancy into every facet of their brand culture and consumer-facing business. The marketing department has engaged channels such as email, social media, display, and onsite merchandising to accelerate the relevancy of their messaging by 10 times. The result is customer loyalty, engagement and spend in a way that very few thought was possible.

The marketers at wehkamp.nl can tell you that it is not easy to achieve such improvements without the right tools to do the job. That is why wehkamp.nl partners with marketing optimization companies including IBM Coremetrics and Responsys to infuse relevancy into its email marketing programs on a massive scale.

Targeting and personalization, delivered

Leveraging robust, bidirectional integration between IBM LIVEmail and Responsys Interact Suite, wehkamp.nl is able to quickly deliver compelling content and product placements to customers. Delivery of content is based on the context of customer behavior on the wehkamp.nl website and the aggregate behavior of similar customers.

The secret to the success of wehkamp.nl has been the ability to understand individual customer motivations and needs, and then build an automated targeting and personalization program around that insight. The strategic mentality and execution of wehkamp.nl is apparent in its multistage email remarketing program. The program follows the fundamental wehkamp.nl site funnel; category or product list browsing (Browsed Overview Mail, or BOM), product detail browsing (Browsed Article Mail, or BAM) and product abandonment (Abandoned Cart Email, or ACE). This approach, playfully dubbed “ACE, BAM, BOM,” allows wehkamp.nl to customize its messages to a particular customer based on which audience segment they fall into at a given point in time.

The marketers understand that where a customer drops out of the purchase cycle reveals a lot about the customer’s particular motivations. This information can be the best way to engage them again. At wehkamp.nl, customer insights are synthesized and syndicated to Responsys automatically by IBM LIVEmail. This information consists of several layers of business logic aimed at matching highest chance-for-conversion content with each individual. Inputs such as order history, real-time stock levels, frequency preferences, credit quality score and recent website behavior help drive decisions regarding which messaging will resonate and convert each shopper to a customer.



The email creative is built on a dynamic template, eliminating the effort and cost of building and maintaining hundreds or even thousands of variant templates. Relevant messaging and products are automatically plugged into the header, call-to-action and body real estate on a subscriber-by-subscriber basis at the time the email is sent.

The numbers don’t lie

The amount and breadth of consumer insight that goes into this program has led to an unmistakable positive trend in performance. This program consistently performs at a 23 percent higher open rate than standard promotional, a 68 percent higher click through rate, a 67 percent lower opt-out rate and a 271 percent higher sales-per-send ratio. These staggering numbers point to the fact that consumers want and respond to more relevant email communications from the brands they trust and buy from repeatedly.

Expanding the reach of relevancy

Every marketer struggles to overcome the issue of precise targeting at the expense of volume. The marketing staff at wehkamp.nl are aware that not all email subscribers will have taken an action onsite that allows for weekly remarketing. Therefore, wehkamp.nl leverages the aggregate “knowledge” of its email customer base to target all subscribers with a “Sunday circular” featuring the best content and products of the week, for each individual. Built-in scoring models that consider the subscribers’ demonstrated product affinities and top-converting email features from the prior week determine the final email content.

With this program, wehkamp.nl is gaining the top and bottom line benefits that come with relevant messaging, without sacrificing reach. Performance metrics like 45 percent greater click through rate and nearly two times the sales-per-send than standard promotional demonstrate just how well these personalized communications resonate with customers. The fact that no discounts are used further solidifies relevancy as a primary driver of results.

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