How Levi’s finds the right fit to improve repurchase rate

The Levi’s Brazil marketing team is tasked with building an iconic brand with 170 years of history. They are stewards of a legacy created over decades of commitment to service, quality, durability and style. Levi’s invented jeans, the iconic garment known the world over. Today, there’s at least one pair of jeans in most closets, a legacy few brands can claim. Levi’s has also dressed people during the most important and memorable moments in history, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Woodstock and beyond. Beyond celebrating their rich history, more recently, Levi’s has also updated its focus to be a pioneer in sustainability.

Levi’s largest audience in Brazil is consumers aged 30+. They tend to have familiarity with the brand, are loyal customers, and have favorite styles. However, the brand globally has identified the need to increase its relevance with Generation Z, the consumers of the future, and to keep up with the trends that matter to today’s consumers. The division in Brazil currently has a customer base of around 500,000 active customers in their SAP Emarsys database. When looking for a customer engagement solution, their goal was to increase customer loyalty, improve customer retention and repurchase rate, and create a strategy to move purchasers away from price sensitivity and waiting for a sale.

Levi’s Brazil partnered with SAP Emarsys and Driven.CX to better understand customer preferences and behavior, to integrate automation strategies, and increase revenue. Being a global enterprise, their local regions faced limitations for what they could achieve. This meant that they were only able to use their previous tool to send basic batch and blast emails lacking in automation and personalization. They were also not collecting first-party data to better understand browsing and purchasing behavior. Once Levi’s Brazil partnered with Emarys and Driven.CX, they were able to maximize their customer data, giving them a wide array of customer preferences and behavior, which led to better strategy and execution.

Easy implementation and short ramp-up time

When Levi’s Brazil first came to SAP Emarsys, they were sending batch and blast emails, and not segmenting their customers based on website browsing and purchasing activity. The Levi’s team in Brazil is lean, so they were looking for a solution that could create an impact while providing ease of use and a short learning curve. 

As an established company, the business can sometimes be slow to adopt newer martech solutions, and they had to overcome internal barriers to implementation. The ease of use of the tool helped get buy-in from key internal stakeholders and helped Levi’s improve results and metrics out of the gate.

Tactics that streamline customer engagement

One of the first orders of business upon bringing in SAP Emarsys was implementing out-of-the-box tactics to improve customer retention and repeat purchases. Chief among these were:

• Welcome
• Abandoned Browse
• Abandoned Cart
• Back in Stock
• Price Drop

Creating an effective welcome strategy once a consumer engaged with the brand by either providing an email address or an SMS number helped Levi’s build a stronger relationship with prospective customers from the start, setting the stage for long-term loyalty and customer satisfaction. 

By quickly being able to identify website visitors who either left a browsing session without putting an item in the cart, or who did add to cart but did not check out, Levi’s Brazil was able to target these consumers with ads and offers that improved the likelihood of purchase and increased revenue without significant effort from the marketing team. Back in stock and price drop messaging helped customers get a product they’d had their eye on, helping improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, while also boosting revenue. 

Levi’s Brazil was able to quickly make an improvement on their bottom line by employing these easy-to-implement tactics. These personalized ad campaigns were created and seeing an impact  in just a few weeks!

Evolving segmentation strategy at scale

As with most retailers, Black Friday is a make-or-break event for Levi’s Brazil. In 2023, after onboarding with SAP Emarsys, they turned their attention to creating a Black Friday strategy that would allow for segmentation at scale. They were able to easily put a landing page to collect contacts. With their lean but agile team, they needed a strategy that would be seamless and easy to deploy in time for Black Friday. Before their partnership with Driven.CX and SAP Emarsys, they didn’t have the capability to be nimble and prepare quickly for spikes in activity. This effort positively impacted the effectiveness of their Black Friday strategy.

Connecting data across the business

Bringing in data from ecommerce, including browsing and purchase history and product and category interest, along with sales data, gave Levi’s Brazil the capacity to integrate and share data into business intelligence tools and SAP Emarsys. Utilizing a new connector between VTEX, an enterprise digital commerce platform, and SAP Emarsys APIs, the team was able to easily  integrate  orders, catalog, and customers in a simple, robust, and parameterizable way. They also used the Web Extend Integrator, responsible for integrating consumer behaviors, feeding tactics and machine learning (Smart Insights) to generate user journey personalization. 

Utilizing Web Extend, they were able to track visitor interactions on their website. They then processed this input to serve validated data to various SAP Emarsys products for ease of use to the Levi’s marketing team and Driven.CX. In turn, they created segmentation based on customer behaviors and had the capacity to create targeted personalization. This solution reduced implementation time from one month to less than 5 business days with zero maintenance. The benefits are not limited to reducing behavioral analysis failures, but also to the possibility of using Web Channel to influence the user journey through banners, pop-ups, personalized showcases, and other Tactics. 

As Hélio Ricardo Araújo of Driven.CX, shared, “The richness of the data and the use of customer behavior that’s provided by SAP Emarsys is… close to a silver bullet.” 

By utilizing SAP Emarsys to learn more about their customers and create an omnichannel strategy across email, digital ads, and SMS, Levi’s Brazil is already showing results in a short window, with over 30% of online revenue now coming from SAP Emarsys automations within the first six months of implementation. By integrating Welcome, Abandoned Browse, Abandoned Cart, Back In Stock and Price Drop automations, they better served their customers and won potentially lost revenue without a significant lift from their marketing team. The capacity to properly use data for targeting on social media and in their ad strategy led to increased revenue and engagement. And this is just the beginning for this go-getting team. Next, they are looking to make greater use of SAP Emarsys’ available features, integrating purchase data from all physical stores to better serve their loyal customers in increasingly personalized and engaging ways.