Emco: How we increased e‑shop sales by 37% with acquisition and retention campaigns

What are our goals

After a successful first six months, we continued our cooperation with Emco for the next six months. This time, however, our goals have changed.

Instead of a general increase in the proportion of retention orders, we were tasked with focusing on the pass-throughs from the first order to the second and from there to the third. Alongside this, we were given a target of increasing the number of new customers by 20%. And all this while maintaining a minimum 20% growth of the entire e-commerce store while keeping the PNO within 6%.

Given the cookie bar issue and the incompleteness of data measurement in advertising tools, we decided to evaluate campaigns from e-commerce data unencumbered by attribution. In order to properly measure the benefit of retention campaigns, our data analytics team prepared Databy reporting in which we could track the evolution of retention metrics over time.

What Emco does

Emco is a Czech family company founded in 1990 by Zdeněk Jahoda, which specializes in the production and distribution of cereal products and health food. With its own mill and carefully selected ingredients, Emco offers a wide range of quality products, including oatmeal, muesli and cereal bars. The company’s emphasis on innovation and sustainability has over the years made it one of the leading players in the health food market not only in the Czech Republic but also abroad. Emco prides itself on its family character, which is reflected in its emphasis on quality, tradition and customer care. With over 30 years of history and a strong market position, Emco continues to grow and look for new ways to bring healthy and delicious products into the daily lives of its customers.

How we approached the cooperation

From the first run in H1 2024 we had already tested the most suitable incentives and segments, so we converted some of the scenarios from manual to automation. We prepared the acquisition of new customers in cooperation with our partner agency Maira, which belongs to the Proficio group as well as Loyaltiq. Alongside this, we also went towards increasing this goal by preparing welcome scenarios and setting up pop-ups to collect new users through CDP Samba’s PowerPOP plug-in. At this stage, we decided not to use discount incentives for the 1st purchase to test people’s “organic” behavior and conversion rates without this incentive.

We’ve got new customers…

We launched acquisition campaigns on Google Ads, Sklik and Meta platforms. Not only did we exclude audiences of existing customers using system audiences, but we also sent segments of existing customers to the tools automatically from Samba for exclusion. In agreement with the client, we defined a new customer as a user who had not purchased in at least 2 years.

In addition to paid campaigns, we supported the entire new customer acquisition process by setting up registration pop-ups and welcome scenarios. We worked with two versions of acquisition incentives in the pop-up:

• free shipping on orders over 300 CZK
• coupon 100+100 for 1st and 2nd order

If a person clicked on the closing cross, the pop-up did not turn off, but minimized to a non-invasive overlay element at the bottom left of the page that communicated a 100 CZK discount on the first purchase.

As part of a welcome series that went out to new users, we communicated the Emco story and the breadth of the > range with a 5+1 free cereal bargain pack and a reminder of unclaimed free shipping or a £100 voucher. The conversion rate of the pop-up comes out to 20%. The welcome email, which offered a code to redeem a 100 Kč discount over 800 Kč, was opened by 70.7% of users and clicked through by 23.7%

After the first order we ran onboarding series that promoted 100 CZK for the second order as a thank you.

…and then we’d buy them up

In one-off reactivation campaigns, we focused on maximizing sales and meeting the set KPIs – motivating customers to move from the first order to the second and from the second to the third.

We sent campaigns every month except October (due to the changeover to the new e-shop solution) and the mailings came in three waves (Wednesday-Friday-Sunday). The first wave was always for the whole selected segment. The second wave then went only to users who had interacted with the mailing in some way and usually brought in about 50% more sales than the first. In the third wave, we also included SMS in the campaign to increase urgency. This strategy of mailing only contacts engaged in the first wave can also have a very positive effect on domain reputation, as email open rates in the second and third waves commonly ranged between 69.2% and 73.6%.

We involved incentives in the campaigns:

• discount voucher
  • -200 CZK for purchases over 1000 CZK
  • -300 CZK for purchases over 1500 CZK
• crediting additional points to the loyalty programme
  • +200 points for purchases over 1000 CZK
  • +300 points for purchases over 1500 CZK

We have taken a standard multi-channel approach to these retention campaigns. In addition to email blasts, we also incorporated paid campaigns where we automated the tools to send given customer segments. Samba’s PowerPOP tool, which we integrated into the website, also contributed to increasing our conversion rate. PowerPOP displayed personalized pop-ups with incentives to selected customer segments.

We also reminded existing customers

In the first six months of our cooperation, we set up most of the retention campaigns manually. We wanted to test audiences, incentives and other influences. In the second half of the year, we were confident from the outcome of the tests which approaches would work and therefore automated the mailings.

Continuous reactivation

We started the continuous reactivation at the beginning of July. This involved reaching out to two groups of contacts:

• 30-720 DSLO, 3+ orders <10 000 CZK
• TOP segment: 30-720 DSLO, 10000+ spend

The continuous reactivation, which we launched in early July, reached 18,290 customers by the end of 2024 with an average open rate of 47.60% and an average click-through rate of 5.10%. Of those who opened the email, 14.60% placed an order. In a continuous reactivation, we send a discount to each contact who previously made multiple purchases but it has been more than a month since their last purchase.

We decided to make the retention multi-step, so after two more days without purchase we will send a reminder email to the contact and if they do not purchase for another 4 days, we will send them a push notification to change the communication channel.

The reminder email contains either the same discount or an increased discount depending on the contact’s behaviour in the automation:

• Original discount 200 CZK
• +2 days: opened the first email and didn’t buy? → increase to 300 CZK
• +4 days: Didn’t open and buy? Reminder of 200 CZK discount

Shopping at noon

We decided to run the reactivation on a regular weekly basis at the time that the data showed to be the most lucrative for shopping during the week – Wednesday at 12pm. A contact could only go through the reactivation once every 30 days. The second wave brought in 30% more orders and 40% more sales than the first wave. The second wave discount generated more than double the sales and brought in more than double the orders compared to the reminder emails.

Conclusion

8.70%. We observed higher engagement for contacts with a discount than for mailings with extra points. However, for contacts with extra points, we did not have to account for the reduction in margin by the value of the discount.

We and the client consider this six months to have been very successful. In the period ahead, we will focus on the same metrics whose target values have increased.

Who was involved in the campaign:

For the agency:

• Petr Vondrlík (Strategy), CEO & Retention Strategist, Loyaltiq
• Lukáš Michele, Retention/Mailing Specialist, Loyaltiq

On behalf of the contracting authority:

• Ondřej Chlumský, E-Commerce Manager, Emco