The Business

PUMA is one of the largest sportswear brands in the world, operating in numerous countries and in multiple languages. The brand has a loyal customer base from everyone to “sneaker freaks” to holiday shoppers, and, especially with the recent shift to digital, a whole host of new digital customers.

Consumer Product, Sports Apparel & Accessories
Bavaria, Germany
40 Emarsys users (across all Emarsys Markets)
20M+ Customers (across all Emarsys Markets)

The Challenge

  • Growing a customer database
  • Scaling personalization across multiple countries and languages, with a small team
  • Building a complete view of the customer

Before partnering with Emarsys, PUMA would send a standard email newsletter to their contact base on a weekly basis. They had nothing set up in terms of marketing automation, personalization, or customer lifecycle strategy. With CRM strategy in its infancy, they faced the complexity of serving customers in multiple segments across numerous countries in a variety of languages — and with a lean marketing team.

They needed a solution to help overcome these challenges, and allow them to activate audiences and deliver increased revenues during the pandemic (and beyond) when store closures across Europe were at their peak.

Their 3-pillar strategy of delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time needed to be implemented quickly to maximize the e-commerce opportunity and delight their customers with personalized experiences that they come to expect from a brand like PUMA.

The Solution

With Emarsys’ customer engagement platform, the brand scaled marketing and CRM operations to identify and target high-value segments and grow the CRM database.

Learn More About Customers to Identify Highly Engaged Segments

Leveraging customer lifecycle insights, PUMA Europe continues to improve its customer identification capabilities to match up in-store with online data. PUMA implemented Smart Insights analytics to significantly improve personalized targeting. By knowing which customers are the most engaged, PUMA unlocks the revenue potential of those customers while increasing engagement and open rates. With a more complete view of the customer, the brand identified highly engaged segments likely to purchase in the next 2-3 months to send relevant content and recommendations, while also reducing the frequency of sends to less engaged segments.

“We worked very closely with Emarsys to build all of our templates and build the logic that meant we could do that at scale. When we send an email, the logic is built, so the subject line will always appear in the right language for that customer. Any product that we feature will feature the right currency for that customer based on where they are… and we can use block targeting to really focus the content to make sure everyone’s seeing the right thing. And that essentially means we only need to build every campaign once.”

Quote Puma David Witts 01 160x160
David Witts
CRM Manager, PUMA Europe

Scaling Personalization with Lifecycle Automation

The PUMA Europe CRM team works very closely with the Emarsys customer experience team — an extended partner of PUMA’s CRM team — on various objectives from strategic initiatives to day-to-day builds.

PUMA and Emarsys built the templates and the underlying logic that allows block targeting and automation to work seamlessly in the background, always displaying the subject line in the right language, the product in the right currency for the customer’s location with the correct promotions.

With a streamlined workflow built on fast-populating templates, PUMA Europe quickly scaled their email sends across all their markets, building each campaign only once.

The Impact

Within 6 months, PUMA Europe grew email revenue by triple digits YoY and increased email engagement, driving up their newsletter audience by nearly 50%.

+5X Revenue from email
+25% Open rates
50% Database growth in 6 months
Triple-digit revenue growth from email in 6 months
5-10% increase in open rates by implementing Send Time Optimization
+10x Weekly subscribers

“We’re obviously A/B testing regularly and testing different functions, which means we can measure that incremental revenue. But also we’ve seen some really good results from an engagement rate perspective as well… And I think what we’re proving is that when you get to know your customers and you’re sending them more personalized things that they want to see, it just helps everything — we see revenue grow, engagement rates grow, better traffic, just a better overall customer experience.”

Quote Puma David Witts 01 160x160
David Witts
CRM Manager, PUMA Europe

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