Clarks uses tech to boost email marketing effectiveness

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jul 28, 2021

Footwear brand Clarks has been facing major challenges in recent periods but the company has scored a notable success with its email personalisation drive and has used technology to boost conversion in this area.

Using performance marketing solution Wunderkind (formerly BounceX) to improve digital targeting and personalisation, the company has claimed a big revenue lift.

The tech helped it “better identify new and returning customers to its site, de-anonymising 32% of site traffic in just a month of go-live”, we’re told.  

This helped it “grow its marketable first-party database as well as improving personalisation to — and segmentation of — returning shoppers, based on triggered communications that map to intent signals customers display whilst shopping online”.

The result of all that was a 5.5-times improvement in revenues growth from abandoned carts, translating to 5% of Clarks total digital revenue. It also saw 13-times more visitors coming back to the site.

The ability to de-anonymise around a third of its site traffic was key because it meant the firm could determine whether site visitors were already opted-in to its email database, “enabling it to target them with high-value, high-converting messaging, based on intent behaviours shoppers display online”. That means it could deliver personalised, triggered emails “to re-engage the customer — whether it’s to remind them about a relevant sale or offer that’s about to end, new product drops or cart abandonment notifications – helping build an ongoing personalised connection with customers”.

Clarks remains one of the five biggest footwear retailers in Western Europe and has operations in 75 countries globally.

Marcus Oughton, its Head of Ecommerce for the UK, Republic of Ireland and EMEA, said its link-up with the tech firm “was aimed at building out our first-party data. Lots has changed in the last couple of years around GDPR, tracking prevention and, in addition to that, a heightened awareness of data ownership by the consumer. What the partnership with Wunderkind enabled us to do was to own our first-party data, and to scale the communication to those consumers. Within the first year of working with them, we doubled our addressable opt-in database”.