wagamama Crafts Personalized Campaigns To Build Customer Loyalty With Bloomreach

Story Behind the Brand

wagamama is the most successful Japanese-style noodle restaurant chain in the UK. Founded in 1992, the brand has grown exponentially and now has locations around the globe, bringing the company’s signature cuisine to customers everywhere.

email open rate for the brand’s “wagamama wrapped” campaign, sent to one million recipients

average email open rate for personalized email campaigns

average click-through rate for personalized email campaigns

Challenge

Customer retention is a key focus for wagamama. To help foster customer loyalty and create ongoing customer relationships, the brand recognized the need to engage its customers with personalized campaigns across multiple channels.

But to achieve truly personalized customer communications, wagamama needed to connect its audience’s in-restaurant experience with meaningful digital touchpoints. The brand needed a holistic understanding of its customers, as well as the automation tools necessary to build tailored campaigns at scale.

Solution

Working closely with our trusted partner Vecton, wagamama leveraged the innovative capabilities of Bloomreach Engagement to unlock AI-driven insights and craft personalized email campaigns that spoke directly to its customers on an individual level.

Using Loomi AI, our AI built for ecommerce, wagamama analyzed and uncovered key retention patterns in its customer behavior, identifying the factors and nuances that nurtured long-term customer relationships.

With these valuable insights, wagamama could build the right email campaigns in Bloomreach Engagement that ticked all the boxes for meaningful and sustainable customer loyalty.

Gaining deeper insights into the factors driving our custom loyalty was vital for our marketing strategy. With Bloomreach, we can get the insights we need and use them to fuel campaigns that make a real impact.

Pal Erik Waagbo

Head of Digital Marketing and Customer Data, wagamama

Results

By tapping into the power of Bloomreach and the collaborative expertise of Vecton, wagamama’s email campaigns harnessed each customer’s unique relationship with the brand — including both online and offline data points — to craft truly personalized messages tailored to individual preferences.

Taking this personalized approach paid off, yielding an average email open rate of over 60% and click-through rates exceeding 17% — both key customer retention metrics for wagamama’s strategy.

One of the company’s most successful efforts was “wagamama wrapped,” a special year-in-review style email campaign that sent a data-driven annual summary of each customer’s interactions with wagamama. The campaign was unique to each customer, highlighting attributes like the user’s favorite dishes, to reflect their individual profile and personalize their retrospective.

The “wagamama wrapped” initiative was a popular campaign with customers and a big success for the brand with a 65% open rate, proving just how powerful data-driven personalization can be.