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Established in 1912, Wittner was the first mail-order footwear business in Australia. Today it is one of the country’s leading footwear brands, however, the company retains the forward-thinking philosophy of its founder that “the goodwill and friendship of old customers means a lot more to us than the mere sale of goods.”
Challenge
Discover and engage loyal customers
With a thriving ecommerce business and stores across Australia and New Zealand, keeping track of its loyal customers was a challenge for Wittner. Wanting to better understand who these people are and what they shop for, formed a central part of its marketing strategy. At the same time, the company wanted to maximize online sales by identifying and engaging with online customers who browsed or carted items but did not make a purchase.
Solution
Integrating online and offline data for actionable customer insights
Working with the team at Dotdigital, Wittner decided to take the approach of incentivising loyalty with the introduction of a tiered reward scheme. To achieve this would require data from Wittner’s Point of Sale and ecommerce systems to be seamlessly integrated with the Dotdigital platform.
Once this vital step was completed, Wittner had access to a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of its customers throughout their lifecycle. This new level of insight enabled them to create and send automations from Dotdigital to notify customers regarding their changing loyalty status and rewards available to them.
The Marketing team at Wittner explains: “When a customer moves to the next tier in our incentive scheme, we automatically send an email congratulating them and letting them know about the benefits available to them. Conversely, customers that drop a level will be sent advice and offer to help them rise back up.”
A further automation was created for online cart and browse abandonment. Using Dotdigital’s segmentation builder, the marketing team at Wittner created a series of campaigns relating to its most popular product categories. So, if a customer is on the website shopping for boots, bridal, heels or sandals but doesn’t buy, the system automatically generates and sends a timely and relevant email featuring similar items, to encourage them to return and make a purchase.
Case study
About Wittner
The founder, HJ Wittner, established the company in 1912 and soon set up Australia’s first ever mail order footwear business, which he ran from his store in Footscray. Three generations on, the Wittner family are proud to be internationally recognised as one of Australia’s leading footwear brands.
By leveraging online and offline data and automating customer engagement through Dotdigital we have increased loyalty and have seen lifetime customer value increasing by 86%."
Results
Increased lifetime customer value from high-impact touchpoints
The new levels of customer insight and marketing automations have resulted in an impressive improvement in the quality of engagement, loyalty and ultimately sales, with Wittner achieving its objective to create high-impact customer touchpoints.
The Marketing team explains: “Our abandonment emails are a testament to the value of using data to drive a personalised customer experience with open rates of more than 50% and click-through rates as high as 18%.”
More than 100 years since the company was founded, Wittner continues its proud tradition of putting the loyalty of its customers first.
