With roots dating back to the year 1926, HEMA (short for ‘Hollandsche Eenheidsprijzen Maatschappij Amsterdam’) is a Dutch variety retailer that began operations as a dime store. Focused on providing premium value to customers, the department store offers a wide variety of personal and household goods at over 800 stores worldwide.
Since the 1990s, HEMA has also expanded into other countries and now operates stores in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. In 2017, the company launched the ‘meer HEMA’ loyalty program – now the second-largest rewards program in the Netherlands – and operates a thriving e-commerce store.
HEMA counts among the most well-known brands in the Netherlands with a history spanning more than 90 years. Constantly evolving, the company runs a state-of-the-art e-commerce shop with home delivery and click-and-collect options.
The challenge: Not all customers are aware of this convenient way to shop. A deep-dive analysis revealed that most HEMA customers tend to shop in stationary retail. This is far from ideal, because multi-channel customers exhibit far higher levels of satisfaction – and significantly higher overall customer spending value.
To make a change, HEMA decided to pursue a three-pronged approach:
All retailers are aiming to build a single customer view based on both offline and online purchases; a multichannel profile. We have managed to do so with Selligent in an innovative and creative way while constantly improving on engagement, orders and revenue through extensive testing and optimization.
Tim van den Berg
CRM Campaign Lead, HEMA
Teaming up with Selligent by Marigold and creative agency Yourzine, HEMA created an online acquisition campaign to reach offline-only rewards members. For full visibility, HEMA used Selligent’s data integration capabilities to connect data streams from its e-commerce platform and data warehouse.
Campaign milestones included:
Personalized product recommendations based on online behavior and survey participation.
Segmented targeting of loyalty members who shop multi-channel vs. offline-only members.
A/B testing of email subject lines and designs to optimize open rates and survey completion.
Strategic use of incentives (15% discount, 100 EUR shopping discount) to nudge conversion.
Yourzine, an Adeptiv agency, is a digital customer journey marketing agency that helps brands and organisations increase customer value throughout all digital and customer contact moments. Their team of marketing professionals embraces various business and marketing models, with one common thread: growth. Yourzine collects, interprets, and implements customer data and information to develop effective customer contact strategies and roll out custom-made creative. Services include data intelligence and solutions, CRM and customer engagement, technology, customer journey strategy, campaign management, and optimization and analytics. Learn more at yourzine.com.
With a constant focus on behavioral data and KPIs, the online acquisition program delivered significant results among ‘meer HEMA’ loyalty members.
Overall, the campaign not only engaged previously offline-only shoppers but provided deep customer insights as the basis for future initiatives. HEMA was able to measure the impact of recommended products and categories and score consumers’ propensity to purchase based on a 360-degree consumer view in Selligent.
Taking the guesswork out of marketing initiatives, HEMA maintained a full view of campaign performance with room to experiment with different versions of deliverables.
“Because of the powerful possibilities within Selligent, we were able to run our A/B tests quickly, differentiate on product recommendations and execute our campaign smoothly,” said Tim van den Berg, CRM Campaign Lead for HEMA.
Marigold: where relationships take root.
