Rakuten: Improving Engagement and Sales Through Email Marketing
A case study from Will Andrews, Digital Marketing Specialist
#digital_strategy #email-marketing
Initial situation
Play.com was one of the UK’s largest online retailers with a high market share in the UK. In 2011, the company was acquired by Rakuten, the largest online retailer in Japan and one of the ten largest online marketplaces in the world. In 2014, play.com was renamed Rakuten.co.uk.
Task
Play.com already had an impressive email database of over 20 million addresses, allowing the company to reach around a third of the UK population. However, only around 3.5 million were active customers. It was therefore necessary to increase their number – without losing existing customers.
Implementation/Results
However, in order not to scare off the 3.5 million Play.com customers with too much advertising, the email marketing campaign was segmented according to how users had behaved in the past. In conjunction with reactivation campaigns that targeted inactive users, the number of customers was sustainably increased – which ultimately led to higher revenue for the entire platform.
