Driving revenue and increasing NPS with personalized email

The CRM team at Helloprint focuses on delivering personalized email experiences to help drive revenue and to reduce support queries. Impressed by their email campaigns and what they’ve achieved, I was excited when their CTO, Michael Heerkens, and Head of CRM, Julien Catani made some time to chat with me.

Helloprint was started in 2013 by four young guys with a dream, and quickly it became an international e-commerce player with more than 150 team members. If you’re not familiar with Helloprint, it’s an online printer that offers everything from booklets to roller banners, it now operates in 8 countries with millions of visitors each year.

The Dutch-based start-up is considered one of the fastest-growing e-commerce platforms in Europe and it won the Deloitte Fast 50 Rising Star 2016.

Choosing a data-first solution

“Syncing new data with our previous systems was a lot of work, and the possibility of error was high” – Michael

Before Vero, the Helloprint team used a system that allowed them to send email newsletters with basic list segmentation. Transactional emails were incorporated into their e-commerce system, a system in which they encountered many restrictions – for example, the only available email trigger was based on a change made to the customer’s order status.

Michael needed a solution that would provide the Helloprint team with the flexibility to design highly personalized data-driven emails, and allow them to efficiently manage these communications in multiple languages.

“It was really important for us to be able to trigger emails on events and not have any limitations on what we wanted to send.” – Michael

Now, Hellprint’s engineering team simply add properties to a data object and Vero automatically accepts it. The same applies to new event triggers.

Designing event-driven email campaigns

8 online shops, 6 languages and 7,000+ customizable products make for a complex set of criteria for personalized email marketing, but Vero provided Helloprint’s engineering and marketing team with the functionality they needed.

“Vero balances the requirements of both our engineering and marketing teams perfectly, enabling them to work together effectively and move quickly” – Michael

With the Vero and Segment integration, it was a matter of ticking a box, putting in an API key and getting started with an initial transactional email immediately. The team was able to set up their first campaign in just a few hours. Vero’s event management features give the CRM team clear visibility and control to quickly create new data-driven email marketing campaigns. From template amendments to campaign automation, Vero offers all the tools and flexibility needed in a fast-paced environment like Helloprint.

HelloPrint’s CRM team use Vero’s event placeholders to design and build new personalised email campaigns. These placeholders allow the team to move quickly when creating new campaigns and to map their exact data requirements.

“Vero enables us to use real-time data to enrich our emails with relevant content to drive a higher ROI” – Julien

For more complicated projects the marketing team still works closely with the engineering team to make sure that every new integration works perfectly. Vero’s data and event management features make it easy for both teams to collaborate on designing and testing new campaigns.

Building personalised campaigns

The simplicity of adding and managing event data, in combination with Multi-language Campaigns and Fusion has played a crucial role in allowing Helloprint to develop the email experience they envisioned.

Fusion is a Vero-specific feature that lets you enrich emails with data pulled directly from both internal and public APIs, at the exact time that emails are being sent. Loading data directly from the source in this way ensures communications are accurate and timely. Fusion enabled Helloprint to streamline their customer experience from email through to their website and to purchase.

“We use Vero’s Fusion feature to insert external attributes in almost every campaign now. It’s been very powerful for us!” – Michael

Helloprint customers now receive a highly personalized email experience, which includes offering unique, customized product recommendations. For example, one of their email campaigns includes an image of the recommended product displaying the customer’s logo – the customer can then click the email to visit the Helloprint website where their logo is embedded, and they can continue to directly purchase their personalized product.

Delivering customers helpful and engaging content

For a company selling over 7,000 customizable products, it is critical to understand the different needs of customers and provide a tailored experience. For example, business customers buying promotional products and consumers buying printed canvases have very different requirements.

Helloprint now has 100+ transactional emails in 6 different languages set up in Vero. Every single order placed by a customer triggers a specific transactional sequence based on several criteria such as the payment method, the creative and the product type. These sequences inform Helloprint customers in real-time about their order status, reducing the number of contact moments with the Helloprint customer service team without sacrificing customer experience. Every single transactional sequence has now been mapped in Vero with success, and the marketing team has more time to develop behavioral email campaigns that focus on increasing revenue.

Through a rigorous testing and optimization process, the team has been able to increase customer engagement and revenue through email.

“…we moved from a mass mailing approach to a personalized customer communication journey. By doing that, we now trigger the right message at the right time for every single customer.” – Julien

HelloPrint increased their NPS by 35%

The proof is in the pudding, since March 2016 when Helloprint implemented Vero as their unique email tool, they have seen a huge improvement in customer happiness metrics.

“Vero helped us to significantly improve our NPS.” – Michael

In 24 months, Helloprint’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) increased by 35% which really showcases the level of engagement customers have with the Helloprint brand.

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