How Ryderwear is building its omnichannel marketing orchestration engine

More than 30 per cent uplift in revenue off email marketing, customer lifetime value improvements and omnichannel campaigns are a few of the early wins for Australian activewear and gym apparel brand, Ryderwear, after overhauling its customer and marketing technology stack.  

The Adelaide-based manufacturer and distributor has built a strong following in its 11+ years of operation, doubling growth year-on-year and working its way up from $17 million to $70 million in recent years. Having initially focused on the bodybuilding market, the brand has shifted focus to the broader fitness industry. It sells 95 per cent of its goods through a direct-to-consumer model.  

With sights set on reaching $100 million in revenue by extending its presence in Australia, the UK, US and Europe, Ryderwear chief marketing officer, Mal Chia, told CMO stronger marketing and customer technology foundations were needed in order to meet the company’s goal. Another big factor driving technology investment was improving customer lifetime value. And that comes back to a single customer view through data.  

“This was about how we centralise all the data we are collecting as it was all siloed – ecommerce, email, apps, loyalty,” Chia explained. “All of these were sitting in their own silos, and how to connect this all was key. It became clear we needed a CDP [customer data platform] and way to connect and centralise all the data, so we could turn it into actionable insights.”  

That led to the decision to rollout Emarsys’ data layer and the vendor’s customer Loyalty Module, to build a 360-degree view of the individual customer as well as increase customer retention and loyalty. Ryderwear has also deployed Emarsys’ Customer Lifecycle Module (Smart Insights) and Omni-Channel Messaging to boost omnichannel engagement and drive a highly personalised and scalable approach to its customer marketing.   

These integrate with the company’s Shopify Plus and Magneto platforms powering the commerce and website, which have been in place since 2017. The solutions replace a former Klaviyo email set-up, along with Smile.io platform for customer loyalty management.  

Ryderwear started rolling out the Emarsys solutions from January 2021. The first step was migrating data from Klaviyo to Emarsys for email marketing. In addition, the company rolled out the Loyalty Module from day one, leading to immediate positive impact, Chia said.  

“Having been through a few of these implementations before, we wanted to make sure we were operating at a pace that wouldn’t overwhelm us but also making sure we were delivering,” Chia said. “We firstly replicated existing functionality we had in other platforms within Emarsys but with the aim of doing things better. We migrated across all our welcome journeys, win backs, price drop, ‘back in stock’ automations and flows from Klaviyo, then improved on them by leveraging the smarts of Emarsys around product recommendations to increase the return across those flows.”    

To do this, Chia’s team benchmarked all email campaigns before migration, so it could track how quickly Ryderwear achieved parity then improve on those activities.  

“All the campaigns started above the performance recorded in Klaviyo. But then as we made improvements to the templates, incorporating Emarsys functionality generated another 30-40 per cent increase on revenue coming from those emails,” Chia said.    

“Emarsys helped us with providing those customised recommendations, which customers to target those to, and identifying big and small customers. We were able to change our segmentations quickly and dynamically through the platform, which has added to the performance improvements as well.”  

Prior to Emarsys and from 2019, Ryderwear has begun segmenting customer, but it was still manual in terms of coming up with criteria for each segment.  

“Emarsys allowed us to set that but also provides its own recommendations on segments. So rather than us creating arbitrary numbers for segments or setting a number for date and time of purchase, Emarsys comes back with the platform with recommended segments that can dynamically adjust,” Chia said.    

“The out-of-the-box segments were sufficient for most of what we wanted to do. We have since created our own segments for categories and also gender. The way it dynamically shifts users means we’re not overcommunicating, and we can communicate at the right time.”  

In addition, Ryderwear previously used its own criteria for win backs, whereas Emarsys win backs have delivered a significant improvement on what was being achieved previously, Chia said.  

Building omnichannel orchestration

Leveraging the omnichannel capabilities of the platform is now the name of the game for Chia.  

“We are creating a fully integrated campaign across website, SMS, email and performance all in one platform. We’re really looking at Emarsys as the orchestration point for how we engage consumers on each channel and be personalised in each channel as well,” Chia said.    

“We are about 60 per cent of way there in terms of integration of other channels. Emarsys is now integrated across email and SMS, and we’ve added the Web extend feature for pop-ups, ribbons and personalised content on the website based on the user. From the beginning, we were using Emarsys segments to power our performance media investments as well.”  

There have been a couple of eye-openers for Chia from the insights so far, one of which is around purchase behaviour. 

“We had a lot of customers that purchase from us a couple of times, then a lot of customers that purchase a lot,” Chia commented. “Emarsys highlighted where the point was around purchasing where we could prompt those customers to convert into more purchasing and create higher lifetime value.”  

Loyalty engagement has also gained sophistication, and Ryderwear engages in communications based on loyalty status, how many points they have, while all the time highlighting product recommendations. This is something Ryderwear is continuing to evolve.  

Other highlights include email open rate increasing by 33 per cent. “Looking at digital revenue we’re able to drive by some of these campaigns and across channels, we’re seeing significant uplift because they’re integrated and activated across multiple channels,” Chia said.  

“Also, by personalising for customers, we can change which offers a new customer gets versus an existing customer.”    

The big ambition for Ryderwear is retention. There is an overarching target of improving lifetime value (LTV) by 40 per cent. Chia said a key area where improvements can be made is increasing purchase frequency from the active customer base, moving a larger ratio of customers from two or more purchases. He noted over 50 per cent of customers purchase from Ryderwear twice a year.  

“By just taking that LTV number more visible, also means it’s clearer what we are aiming for,” Chia said.  

“Every month, we’re aiming for 1-2 automations, testing and optimising them while also going back and continuing to optimise existing automations as well. It’s driving our test and learn mindset, and ensuring we continue to improve what we’re doing.”  

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