Sunweb Group is one of the leading travel groups in Europe with more than €600 million in annual turnover. The Group operates several brands within seven international markets: The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, United Kingdom, Germany, and France.
Sunweb is the flagship brand of the group, operating as a purely online player for packaged holidays to sun and winter sport destinations. Sunweb Group employs approximately 500 individuals and delivers holiday experiences to more than one million happy clients every year.
In today’s relationship-driven consumer environment, it’s all about knowing the needs of your existing customers – and making an attractive offer at the perfect time of purchase readiness. By analyzing booking data from previous years, Sunweb was able to pinpoint the “moments of truth” for so-called ancillary bookings, meaning extra services or packages to supplement a city trip or winter sports vacation.
Working with long-time Selligent partner agency De Heeren van Veertig Plus (DHVVP), Sunweb translated these insights into a data-driven upsell email campaign to meet the following challenges:
Working with Selligent gives Sunweb the ultimate platform to engage with our customers using multi-channel, multi-language, and multi-brand communication. The tool provides us with one central communication tool towards our customers, but also for internal communication matters like customer service.
Anita Vonk
Product Owner Customer Intelligence, Sunweb Group
Rising to the complex task, Sunweb assembled a team featuring experts from business, IT, and BI departments, alongside implementation partner DHVVP. Working with Selligent Marketing Cloud as the centralized campaign tool, integrated with Sunweb’s third-party apps and social channels, the team navigated the following milestones:
Relational Data & Consumer Profiles Using Selligent as a relational database, customers booking holidays across any of the Sunweb Group brands were captured in an audience list in Selligent, replete with consumer profiles.
AI-Powered Personalization Selligent automatically personalizes emails based on the data collected about Sunweb customers. The content editor allows marketers to create offers to match interests via visual constraints in the templates.
Automated Journeys & Send Times Selligent’s marketing automation also creates target groups for emails, while choosing the perfect send time for each recipient.
On-Brand Templates Across the Organization Sunweb created a ‘hyperdynamic’ email template in Selligent to be used for all brands and languages in the entire Group. While the content is dynamic and data-driven, each email’s template meets brand-approved visuals and language conventions for an on-brand look.
Dutch marketing experts De Heeren van Veertig Plus (DHVVP) specialize in automating customer journeys and customer touchpoints with a focus on actionable results. The agency has worked with Selligent for many years, offering performance-based marketing automation and best practices on Selligent Marketing Cloud. DHVVP prides itself in encouraging conversions by showing consumers real time, relevant offers across web shops, websites, emails, and social media visits as the agency that “eats, sleeps and drinks Selligent.”
Thanks to DHVVP and Selligent, Sunweb could meet a short time window for the data-driven campaign across six brands. Closely monitoring results in Selligent allowed for optimizing new releases on the go.
“By working with pressure-cooker sessions, we managed to achieve the impossible with the given complexity. Add to this the situation around the coronavirus and we have performed a small miracle,”
said Joost Kaart, Head of Online Marketing Innovation at Sunweb.
Looking at the results (99.89% Average Delivery Rate, 75.58% Average Open Rate, 26.61% Average Click to Open Rate), the upsell campaign put wings on email deliverability and open rates, while causing a steep rise in booking revenue. Sunweb can now deliver personalized relevance to individual customers at scale – reflected in high KPI scores – based on a workflow that’s highly complex but easy to navigate.
“The ability to use just one template for all our brands, countries, and languages saves us an enormous amount of time which leads to great efficiency,”
said Joost Kaart.
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