Science in Sport are a sports nutrition supplier. The brand turned to dotmailer to help segment their customer base effectively and drive creative campaigns. dotmailer discuss the work

Brief

Science in Sport had enjoyed success as a family enterprise, but everyone involved after its takeover recognised that the growth potential needed to be managed carefully, so one of the marketing team’s first activities was to deep-dive into the customer base to create a more informed and targeted profile.

With a wide market potential, spanning elite athletes to amateur sports enthusiasts, the next stage was to understand what creates and supports the brand values to drive effective creative campaigns.

One of the business’ first moves to build a strong digital presence, integrated across all media channels, was to bring on board a digital media expert. The strategy was to build a strong digital presence.

Strategy

The customer database held around 80,000 names, but the strategy that had been used by the founders was very different from that needed for a mainstream business.

Although it was tempting to have a complete refresh of the digital platforms, this would have proved to be not only expensive but also disruptive, so the decision was made to just change the email service. This is when they introduced dotmailer.

“We started to look at how people use the website, and especially abandoned baskets, in order to analyse their web journey and how they move on to make purchases, and help us to build a much more detailed profile of our online customers,” explains Ashley Read, Marketing Director.

“As part of this we introduced Google Analytics to track every aspect of site usage. We have also linked this to our email activity, so we are able to see where an action has been triggered, either by an email or by a specific offer.”

Execution

One of the first activities dotmailer carried out as part of their managed service was to integrate Salesforce.com seamlessly with the dotmailer platform. This immediately opened up Science in Sport’s ability to segment not only based on interests and previous purchasing, but also by customer behaviour on receiving and reacting to email, and their use of the website.

“We had been trying to use the same email content as both a sales and marketing channel, sending out just one email per week,” explains Ashley. “Instead we decided to split the content and have one email per week with a product offer, and another newsletter style email that focuses on the core science behind the brand and shows how using effective sports nutrition can help athletes to perform better.”

Result

Read identifies the role email has played the company growth.

“Before we started with dotmailer in May last year, we weren’t able to produce such detailed analytics as we can today, but we were able to see that email generated around 19 per cent of our total online revenue. By comparison, in the period from 1 May to 31 December, after implementing dotmailer, this had grown to 33 per cent of revenue. We also saw average order values rise from 26 to 38 pounds—a growth of 26 per cent.

“Perhaps the most important aspect of working with dotmailer is that they have taken the time to understand our business and objectives and provide us with a seamless service so we really do work together as one team with the shared objective of helping us deliver our peak performance.”