Online action sports retailer, FreestyleXtreme is using its artificial intelligence (AI) enabled cloud marketing platform to increase revenues and engage more effectively with customers.
The challenge
The company started as a family business in a garden shed and has grown to shipping goods to more than 60 countries, but the team wanted to retain the personal touch and voice it had as a small business.
The solution
Working with Emarsys, the team can maintain that personal approach to its customer comms, but it takes just two hours to send tailored emails to half a million international customers across 60 markets in 14 languages – whereas it used to take two people two days.
To help achieve this, FreestyleXtreme is using the Emarsys’ AI-enabled cloud marketing platform, including Automation, Smart Insight,Web Extend, Predict (web and email) and Smart Content solutions.
The impact, which supports FreestyleXtreme’s global expansion, includes increasing web revenues by 8% and significantly reducing the time taken to email its database from two days to two hours.
The increased agility and time savings achieved has allowed the marketing team to focus on developing more creative, personalised content to optimise campaigns.
Emarsys is helping FreestyleXtreme to build individual customer profiles based on their preferences and previous omnichannel online experiences.
Emarsys solutions also save time for FreestyleXtreme’s marketing team by applying these individual customer profiles to automatically populate personalised templates. Using Emarsys Smart Content, it now takes just two hours to send tailored emails to half a million international customers across 60 markets in 14 languages, freeing up staff resource to focus on developing more creative content to go into emails, rather than using less effective basic templates.
The results
The ‘recommended for you’ functionality of Emarsys Predict Web recommendations has increased website revenues by 8%, with the software directly contributing to 4.2% of the company’s total revenues.
“At FreestyleXtreme, we love what we do. We’re action sport fans ourselves, and we want to make sure our personality and knowledge comes across in all our customer interactions. We understand that our revenues are driven by our ability to help customers find the best products to get the most from their chosen sport,” says Shaun Loughlin, Managing Director, FreestyleXtreme. “Using the Emarsys platform, we can now personalise all customer communications, including bespoke customer emails in their own language or ensuring that our homepage features the goods they’re most likely to be looking for. And it’s clearly working. Not only are we helping more people get into the sports and lifestyle scenes that we’re passionate about, but we’re directly increasing revenue as a result of the personalisation at scale that Emarsys has helped us achieve.”
The Emarsys platform is going to be used to support further growth as FreestyleXtreme expands into the Japanese and Eastern European markets. Knowing the platform will automate the translation of emails and website store fronts to customers in new territories, the company can drive further revenues with very little additional resource required.
“You can understand why FreestyleXtreme has grown so quickly, as its distinctive voice and passion for action sports resonates with its customers,” says Steven Ledgerwood, Managing Director, UK at Emarsys. “We’re thrilled the team there has chosen Emarsys to maintain personalised communications and are looking forward to supporting the company as it makes use of our AI technology to help enter new markets and grow. We’ve built our platform to take care of the grunt work so companies like FreestyleXtreme can focus on developing creative campaigns and content that truly resonates with their audiences.”