The Business
Ferrara is an undisputed leader in sweet snacking. It believes in sharing delight in every bite through high-quality products, superior innovation, and a portfolio of beloved brands. Ferrara knows exactly what its customers want – sweet treats and new fun flavors to rock their tastebuds. Ferrara wanted to create a modern omnichannel experience for consumers to build relationships with fans across its iconic brands. To enable the sweet spot of strong data onboarding compliance in readiness to activate progressive profiling, the candy maker invested in customer data solutions from SAP and the SAP Emarsys solution.
The Challenge
For a company that believes in sharing delight in every bite, Ferrara has a sweet mix of high-quality products, superior innovation, and a portfolio of beloved brands. Long established as America’s sweet spot of snacking with irresistible jellies, candies, and sweet sugar-free delights, Ferrara keeps its finger on the pulse of what consumers desire. And while the legendary brands of SweeTARTS, Trolli, Nerds, Brach’s, and more are loved by consumers, Ferrara continues to introduce sweet new sensations.
As part of its revitalized, customer-focused, omnichannel strategy, Ferrara wanted to get closer to consumers but was hampered by legacy technologies that limited its ability to engage and personalize experiences across channels.
Wanting to unleash relevant and engaging digital marketing experiences to build relationships with brand fans, Ferrara recognized it was time to invest in a central data platform. With strong compliance around consumer data onboarding and management as an absolute priority, Ferrara made the decision to invest in a suite of modern tools in the cloud.
“Our marketing teams are really looking to engage directly with consumers to provide them with content and campaigns, because we want happy brand fans.”
The Solution
In pursuit of a unified customer profile across its top 10 priority brands
To lay the technology cornerstones of its omnichannel engagement and personalization ambitions, Ferrara selected SAP Customer Identity Access Management (SAP CIAM) for B2C, SAP Customer Data Platform, and the SAP Emarsys solution.
Investing in SAP CIAM for B2C allows Ferrara to make way for more engaging marketing experiences and build trusted relationships based on heightened security and personalization. The solution speeds time to value with frictionless customer onboarding and boosts ROI by fueling personalization capabilities with first-party, permission-based data.
Meanwhile, with SAP Customer Data Platform, Ferrara has a centralized data foundation to ingest, process, and share customer data in real time, allowing it to double down on targeting. And with SAP Emarsys Ferrara can target at a granular level, ultimately paving the way for hyperpersonalized customer experiences that resonate with brand fans.
Integrating consumer insights with retail and supply chain information
When you acquire an iconic brand like SweeTARTS, integrating all its consumer insights, retail information, and supply chain information in one place is crucial. The SAP HANA database and SAP Analytics solutions allowed the candy giant to do this faster than ever before – “Ferrara Fast.”
“Taking that data from the SAP environment and generating insights and the knowledge to make effective business decisions has been a big win for Ferrara,” acknowledges Kustes.
The Impact
Since implementing the solutions, Ferrara has seen open rates for e-mail campaigns of between 20% and 30%, which is 10% to 20% above the industry average. And using the solutions helps ensure Ferrara engages with consumers in a way that respects consumer privacy laws. The company is also conducting A/B test personalization within the subject and body of the e-mails to gauge the benefits of personalization in terms of more consumer engagement.
Reflecting on the technology adoption, Dan Bartelsen, director of information technology business partners for e-commerce and digital at Ferrara, views SAP Customer Experience solutions as foundational for its future customer engagement needs.
“Already, e-mail has been a bit of a game changer for Ferrara. Our campaigns have driven really high engagement, and from an investment perspective, it’s a very effective channel for building loyalty with consumers.”
In the future, Ferrara will be able to link this information with conversion and consumption insights.
As Ferrara takes advantage of strong engagement with its e-mail campaigns, the company is looking forward to the idea of using progressive profiling. Helping it learn more about its customers, Ferrara will enrich customer data by ingesting information from any microsite or campaign through SAP Customer Data Platform.
Bartelsen explains, “The lion’s share of the work is currently being done using SAP Emarsys. But when it comes to insights, analytics, media efficiency, and consumer engagement, SAP Customer Data Platform is where we can really start to enrich consumer data from different sources, build audiences, and ingest anonymized data from other platforms and then target consumers who are brand fans.”
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open rates for email campaigns
“We’re consumer-driven, so we need as much information as possible. We need to understand behaviors for the people that go into the store… and we need to understand what they want from us next.”