Crocs partnered with DEG to develop and establish a global standard of email best practices for use across all regions of brand operations.

Technology has connected global brands with consumers around the world, prompting companies to adapt messaging to the language of their customers. To do this at scale can be cumbersome, but one global company knew it needed to find a way to meet the needs of its email subscribers with an efficient process.

The challenge

Global footwear maker Crocs has sold more than 600 million shoes in 18 regions—and more than 90 countries—since opening in 2002. Each regional unit has a wide range of email marketing sophistication levels and a different way to greet its customers. Crocs partnered with DEG to develop and establish a global standard of email best practices for use across all regions of brand operations.

Consumers around the globe speak different languages and live within different cultures, requiring brands to adapt their messaging to better meet their needs. DEG and Crocs kept this in mind as they collaborated on how to best craft a global email solution.

The strategy

With varying email program sizes and budgets per region, Crocs’ email marketing needed to become more efficient and save time, while also replicating email campaign strategies, queries, and templates across regions. To keep Crocs’ email campaign strategy consistent, DEG worked to develop one regional set of standards that would be adaptable for all other regions, ensuring best practices for improved email deliverability and engagement.

Within the first six months, Crocs’ five 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.

The solution

DEG developed responsive email templates and automated and triggered messages for the Crocs United States email marketing team first. After observing success within the deployment and engagement of the U.S. email program, Crocs and DEG collaborated to adapt these designs and apply them globally to all triggered and automated messages.

To do this, DEG created email playbooks to encapsulate the success of the U.S. email program in a modular design that was flexible enough to accommodate the local language and preferences for each region. DEG selected five key campaigns from the Crocs U.S. region—welcome, anniversary, post-purchase, abandoned cart, and re-engagement programs—to build into a playbook for all regions.

To address the challenges of variance in language, content, and technologies supported across each region, DEG formed a team of experts from its email strategy, design, and engineering teams to collaborate throughout the development stages of each playbook. This ensured each playbook was customizable in content and structure for each region, while the data was standardized in format for deployment purposes.

The outcome

Crocs and DEG launched the first five email playbooks, resulting in approximately 109 emails sent throughout 15 regions, following the successful U.S. email program launch. Within the first six months, these five 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. The modular template design allows Crocs to save time and money by replicating email messages instead of recreating them.

With the success of the first playbooks, DEG is adapting additional email campaigns into playbooks for global use, including birthday and loyalty program playbooks. Moving forward, Crocs and DEG are working to engage customers and provide a similar email experience with the brand no matter where they are in the world.