💔 The breakup files: Why Adidas and SRG switched to Insider

Today’s customers are flooded with so many choices they can be picky about who they shop with. One bad experience is enough to have them bouncing from your website because there will always be another site that’s quicker, more intuitive, and better tailored to them. 

With retail titans like Amazon investing millions of dollars in delivering the best customer experiences a shopper can get, many retail brands are left wondering how they can fight back. 

It all comes down to delivering an experience on your site that’s relevant, seamless, contextual, and timely. Your customers need to feel seen, valued, and appreciated by your brand if you stand any hope of winning their love long-term. That means delivering a consistently relevant experience across every single marketing touchpoint—from email to SMS to WhatsApp—and delivering it at scale.

And if your current martech stack can’t support you in delivering that? Well then, it’s time to switch. Something retail powerhouses Adidas and SRG knew all too well…

It’s not me—it’s you

Like many brands worldwide, SRG and Adidas had hit a wall with their growth strategies and martech platforms.

For Adidas, the issue was scalability.“Our traffic grew exponentially during lockdown, but we were ill-equipped to engage and retain these visitors,” explains Adidas’ Senior Ecommerce Manager. “We needed a solution that would help us deliver personalization at scale to boost engagement and drive conversions.” 

Similarly, SRG’s international presence meant providing unique experiences for a diverse customer base was tricky. The team lacked differentiation across brands, countries, and products, which was hindering its customer engagement significantly and impacting sales growth. The brand wanted to focus its efforts on personalizing its website and mobile app but was unsure where to start.

Time to break up?

Both Adidas and SRG knew something needed to change. They had to switch up their martech stacks if they wanted to deliver the experiences their customers expected (and deserved!). “Insider’s willingness to run a Proof of Concept and back their claims set them apart from the rest,” says SRG’s Group GM of Digital and Omnichannel. 

“The platform’s scalability, ease of use, and potential for personalized experiences were crucial in our decision.” — Group GM of Digital and Omnichannel at SRG

Meanwhile for Adidas, the choice was equally simple: “Insider had just the right set of tools.” It was time to switch to Insider’s enterprise omnichannel marketing solution.

The art of personalized engagement

With help from Insider’s implementation experts, Adidas and SRG unified data from across the entire tech stack into Insider’s intuitive CDP. This meant they could track every customer action across the entire lifecycle in one single place. With unified zero-, first-, and third-party data, both brands could build complete customer profiles and gain access to a 360-degree view of their customers. 

With data now finally visible and actionable in Insider’s platform, it was time for both brands to work on building the seamless customer experiences their customers deserved.

Reducing campaign launch time by 80%

First up, SRG faced a common issue of busy marketers: how to get campaigns up and running quickly without heavy reliance on the IT team. Its current process with another vendor took a lengthy 30 days from ideation to launch, and the slow pace made it difficult to react to real-time changes and trends in the market. 

Insider’s platform promised the quickest time to value on the market, and SRG soon discovered why. The intuitive interface enabled international marketing teams to manage and launch personalization campaigns within just six days, an incredible 80% reduction from the original launch times. No longer tied to tech support, the marketing team could allocate more time to improving AOV and CVR and developing their customer experience strategies. 

“Insider’s platform drove a 37x ROI for us, revolutionizing our CRO efforts and elevating our customer engagement.” — Group GM of Digital and Omnichannel at SRG

To drive conversions and boost customer engagement, SRG quickly implemented Web Suite to improve onsite experiences with personalized messages. By leveraging Insider’s predictive audience tool, SRG closely tracked and analyzed each visitor’s discount affinity, conversion potential, purchasing patterns, lifecycle stage, and brand interactions to deliver highly targeted experiences as unique as each customer. 

The team also adopted Web Push to send out notifications to users, even when they weren’t actively on the website, ensuring that personalized, data-driven product recommendations reached users wherever they were.

“Insider’s platform drove a 37x ROI for us, revolutionizing our CRO efforts and elevating our customer engagement.” — Group GM of Digital and Omnichannel at SRG

Embracing AI-powered personalization with smart recommendations

Adidas wanted to harness the power of AI and machine learning to make it easier for customers to discover and purchase new products—and it needed to do this at scale. Luckily, automatically showing relevant products based on each customer’s browsing history, intent, and behavior was now possible with Insider’s CDP.

Insider’s growth experts helped Adidas implement Smart Recommender, which combines the power of machine learning and AI to show relevant product suggestions to Adidas’ customers, such as trending products, recently viewed items, location-based bestsellers, and often purchased together. 

“Insider’s growth experts suggested exactly which tools to use to achieve our objectives. We implemented personalized product recommendations on the homepage and this helped us generate a 13% increase in conversion rate in one month.” — Senior Ecommerce Manager at Adidas

The perfect match 💘

Thanks to Insider’s range of personalization tools combined with advanced segmentation capabilities, the team at Adidas hugely improved the performance of their website across both Mobile and Web. They were able to engage their audience with relevant, timely, and personalized messaging to increase conversion rates by 13% and AOV by 259%.

Similarly, Insider’s influence on SRG has exceeded the brand’s expectations. Not only has it witnessed a huge 37X ROI in less than a year thanks to the power of personalization, but the reduction in campaign launch time has enhanced operational efficiency, too. 

And it’s not just Adidas and SRG who trust Insider—1,200 brands use our platform to build seamless, omnichannel customer experiences at scale—including Philips, Coca-Cola, MAC Cosmetics, Estee Lauder, Burger King, and L’Oréal. 

“Insider’s platform capabilities are limitless. The tool addresses several of our challenges, and has simplified the use of a complex CMS. We’ve enjoyed some great benefits with Insider, including mobile navigation optimization and web and mobile conversions. As the platform is easy to use, we’re able to deliver highly impactful user journeys swiftly.” — Website and SEO Manager at Philips. Read the case study.

“Insider has become so much more than a technology partner for us. They own our growth targets like their own and always share best practices and industry know-how, helping us skip trial-and-error phases to achieve results faster. We’ve managed to achieve 6X ROI from the [platform] already.” — Group Head of Digital Marketing and Ecommerce at Vodafone. Read the case study.

The future of retail e-commerce

Success is all about driving online shopping experiences that are perfectly tailored to whoever is browsing your site. This means leveraging real-time customer data is the secret weapon for success, and the more personalized you can be, the better.

However, this level of hyper-personalization isn’t possible without the right tools to support you. Retail brands need an actionable, intuitive marketing platform that enables them to deliver seamless experiences at scale—and on autopilot. 

If your current martech can’t help you achieve that, it’s time to break up and switch to Insider.

Keep reading

You can find out more about how Insider supports retail brands like yours by downloading The ultimate digital growth guide for retail and ecommerce. We share tips, tactics, and real-life examples from all your favorite retail brands—including MAC Cosmetics, Yves Rocher, Clarins, Avon, and Sephora—on how to drive more growth and revenue.