Client
Crocs
Services
Email
Email Strategy

Crocs Gains Efficient Email Strategy with Global Playbooks

A global company must use email marketing to connect with its international customers in any language they speak. This means saying bienvenido (welcome) in Spanish, merci (thank you) in French, hallo wieder (hello again) in German, 축하합니다 (congratulations) in Korean, and мы скучали по тебе (we missed you) in Russian. Global footwear maker Crocs sells more than 300 styles of shoes in 18 regional units – and more than 90 countries – across the globe, each with a wide range of email marketing sophistication levels, and a different way to greet its customers.

The Ask

DEG successfully developed responsive email designs and automated and triggered messages for the Crocs United States email marketing team. After seeing this success, Crocs and DEG worked to take these designs and apply them globally to triggered and automated messages. With varying program sizes and budgets in other regions, Crocs email marketing needed to become more efficient and save time, while also replicating email campaign strategies, queries, and templates across regions.

 

The Answer

To keep Crocs’ email campaign strategy consistent across all regions, DEG created email playbooks, which were designed modularly in order to flexibly accommodate the local language and preferences. DEG selected five of Crocs’ key campaigns from the US region – welcome, anniversary, post purchase, abandon cart, and reengagement programs – to develop scalable playbooks for all regions. These playbooks take the best practices from the US region and apply them to the regions across the world, so customers in every Crocs region are receiving similar brand experiences.

The challenge in rolling out global campaigns through playbooks is the many variances in language and content, as well as what technologies the regions could support, among other factors. DEG’s email strategy, design, and engineering teams collaborated early and often during the development stages, as the playbooks needed to be customizable for every region, while the data needed to be in a standardized format so the designs would accommodate the changes in content and structure.

Despite the challenges, the playbooks solved a core business problem of how to roll out tactics globally in a more efficient way.

The Result

DEG’s five Crocs email playbooks have resulted in the launch of approximately 109 emails in 15 regions since the US team launched the first in early 2014. The modular design allows Crocs to save time and money by being able to replicate instead of recreate. During the first six-months after launch, the playbooks garnered an increase in subscriber engagement with greater open rates, click-through rates, and click-to-open rates compared to non-playbook emails of the same content.

With the success of the first playbooks, DEG is continuing to develop other Crocs email campaigns into playbooks for global use. Crocs is developing birthday and loyalty program playbooks and will continue to update and create playbooks as a major aspect of Crocs’ global email strategy. DEG and Crocs are working hard to engage customers of the brand and achieve the same level of satisfaction regarding their Crocs experience, no matter where they are at in the world.

See More Work