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Customer Success Stories

How BrewDog Increased Revenue +13.8% Using Personalized Email Campaigns

By Carl Bleich

11/12/2021


The process for many companies focused on email marketing these days is simple: clicks lead to conversions and conversions lead to revenue. 

But getting more clicks, conversions, and earning more revenue isn’t as easy as it can seem. There’s no magic wand to wave to make customers click on an email or make a purchase. 

BrewDog, a Bloomreach customer and an award-winning Scottish craft beer company founded in 2007, has a portfolio that includes breweries in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia. But its online channel is a huge contributor as well and what helped it to achieve an incredible €215 million in total gross revenue in 2019. 

Online clicks and conversions are vastly important for BrewDog and using intelligent data-driven email campaigns with Bloomreach Engagement has helped the Scottish brewer increase key metrics and spread its brand even further across the world. 

BrewDog’s Winning Data-Driven Email Campaign 

In cooperation with Bloomreach partner Voxwise, BrewDog has delivered many successful use cases with its use of Bloomreach Engagement. 

One in particular stands out: 13.8% extra revenue generated in its completely random A/B split test in a data-driven email campaign. 

BrewDog took a group of 80,000 customers and split it down the middle as half received a non-personalized version of an email and the other half received an upgraded version based on personalized data. Specifically, the personalized 40,000 customers were split based on: 

  • Web activity
  • Recent purchases
  • BrewDog investor status

Personalized data made all the difference. The customers who received the personalized email clicked on it 15.6% more of the time, had a 11.5% conversion rate, and generated 13.8% revenue compared to the 40,000 customers who all received the same non-personalized email. 

Tailored Subject Lines Helped BrewDog’s Cause

Bloomreach targeted customers who had not bought anything in the past two days. There was an A/B test where half of the customers were pushed to a journey where they received a general email blast about last offers on some beers. The other half was pushed to a journey where they were segmented and had different subject lines for each segment. This helped push the group that received the personalized email into action. 

This day and age, no consumer wants to feel like a number. Wherever customers might stand with your company, it’s a good idea to personalize an email subject line to ensure that you are communicating appropriately with them for wherever they are at in the customer journey. 

That doesn’t necessarily mean the subject line has to be truly personalized and feature a customer’s personal information. BrewDog opted out of this strategy and was successful. 

The subject lines in the campaign were as follows: 

  • Inactive customers (based on web activity): Up to 25% off craft beer. Ending soon!
  • General and active customers (based on web activity and recent purchases): Hurry! Offers ending soon
  • BrewDog investors: Fridge looking empty? Our offers end soon! 

The Possibilities are Endless with Bloomreach’s Email Campaigns

Email campaigns have so many possibilities with Bloomreach Engagement. 

While BrewDog opted to use a countdown timer, GIF headline picture, and dynamic links to products and categories, there are many different options for marketers to personalize their emails with Bloomreach and ensure that they hit home with customers. 

The countdown timer helps to convert more customers, who can be moved to action prior to the timer expiring to avoid missing the advertised deal. 

The GIF headline picture helps to attract customers’ attention to the right place in the email since the image isn’t necessarily stagnant as many email images are. The dynamic links can help direct shoppers to key places such as “clearance”, “bundles”, or “best sellers”. 

“The next logical step for us was Bloomreach Engagement after outgrowing our previous marketing automation platform,” said Tom Reding, Director of Digital and Ecommerce for BrewDog. “It has the perfect combination of ease of use and complexity. It has truly enabled us to deliver personalized experiences at scale. This is just the beginning of a very long and successful partnership with Bloomreach and Voxwise that we are very much looking forward to.”

Bloomreach Engagement Makes it All Possible

BrewDog’s intelligent data-driven email campaigns are possible thanks to an engagement module with incredible capabilities. 

Marketers can use Bloomreach Engagement to connect with customers on the channel that best suits their needs. This makes it easy to deliver connected customer experiences from a unified user interface. 

If you’re interested in learning how Bloomreach can help your business with its engagement module, schedule a personalized demo today to learn more.

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Carl Bleich

Head of Content at Bloomreach

Carl works with Bloomreach professionals to produce valuable, customer-centric content. A trusted expert with over 15 years of experience, Carl loves exploring unique ways to turn problems into solutions within digital commerce. Read more from Carl here.

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