The Business
Founded in 1985, City Beach has established itself as Australia’s premier youth fashion retailer. Today, the business has grown to 70+ physical stores and 1.4 million database contacts, and through digital transformation, continues to accelerate both in-store and online revenue. However, amidst this rapid growth, the brand’s ability to establish and sustain lasting, meaningful relationships with their customers has plateaued. To strengthen customer relationships, prevent customer churn, and drive repeat purchases, CIty Beach needed help scaling their business to achieve 1:1 omnichannel engagement.
The Challenge
City Beach was interested in creating unified customer profiles that would merge all of a customer’s online and offline shopping behavior and purchase history. This would allow the brand to better understand their customers’ true LTV, as well as where they are in the customer lifecycle.
As City Beach’s database of customers rapidly expanded alongside the growth of their business, it became more and more difficult to treat their 1,000,000-plus customers as individuals. To solve this problem, City Beach sought to turn their data into actionable insights by segmenting their audience according to customer lifecycles, lifetime value, and RFM. With their new retention strategy in hand, City Beach needed the technology to automate personalized experiences at scale.
With so many points of sale and customer service touchpoints to maintain, City Beach was looking for a single marketing platform that would enhance their ability to retarget through their CRM channel and integrate all important touchpoints along with the brand’s loyalty program.
“The biggest win was shifting our focus from short-term ROAS goals to long-term retention goals by working out customer lifetime value. This meant not just focusing on single transactions, but focusing on engaging customers with the City Beach brand over a longer lifecycle.”
Advancing AI Capabilities with SAP Emarsys
After initial successes digitalizing online and in-store processes, and having reached a steady 100% growth rate year-over-year, City Beach wanted to better engage their 1.4 million database contacts and treat each customer as more than just an email address — they wanted to deliver true 1:1 engagements. But with a database that size, they needed help. The brand turned to AI to help them scale their business and achieve the 1:1 omnichannel engagement necessary for preventing customer churn and driving repeat purchases.
“We wanted a single marketing solution that could scale up with our business. SAP Emarsys helped us join the dots across an increasingly complex customer journey with touchpoints from stores to website to customer service interactions. Implementing AI was a perfect fit for our retention and reactivation activities. AI was able to predict where people were churning or defecting at a 1:1 level, and this allowed us to send campaigns based on customers’ individual life cycle.”
The Solution
The SAP Emarsys customer engagement platform offered City Beach a way to consolidate all their data in one place. Using Smart Insight within the platform, City Beach cleaned up and organized the millions of contacts in their database, giving the marketing team a better understanding of which segments to focus on for driving revenue.
With SAP Emarsys, City Beach also gained scalable marketing execution with personalisation tools and the ability to automate key campaigns. By integrating their loyalty program, points of sales, and related customer service touchpoints, they were able to improve their channel performance and deliver consistent and connected customer experiences.
After the success of the partnership, City Beach advanced on their journey of delivering true 1:1 customer experiences by incorporating SAP Emarsys’ Max AI to shift to a predictive marketing approach. This opened new revenue opportunities and use cases and helped the company improve personalization, while improving the efficiency for the CRM team.
The Impact
After partnering with SAP Emarsys, City Beach significantly improved customer engagement through their email channel, and quickly scaled personalized interactions across mobile, social, SMS, and web channels.
“City Beach integrated SAP Emarsys and hasn‘t looked back. With a 100% increase in revenue from key channels, improved speed to market, deeper customer insights, and all with a decreased cost base, SAP Emarsys is now the marketing team’s ROI engine and one that’s clearly designed and tuned for modern communications.”