Adidas Case Study: x2 Sales with the "Happy Birthday" Trigger Thanks to a Targeted Widget

The “Happy Birthday” trigger is one of the best practices in email marketing. It is season-independent and maintains engagement by reactivating dormant customers. In addition, this trigger is capable of generating stable profits.

In this article, we will tell you how the adidas brand leverages the “Happy Birthday” trigger and how they managed to increase sales by adding widgets to the workflow.

About the project

Adidas is known as a global leader in sporting goods sales. The brand cares about the quality of direct marketing and has been working with CDP Yespo since 2021. During this time, adidas has found the best communication channels for its audience:

• email;
• web push;
• widgets.

For efficient automation in customer communication, the company uses triggers of the Pro tariff, such as "Price Reduction for Items in Cart", "Price Reduction for Similar Products from Wishlist", "New Arrivals on Website", etc.

Task

The "Happy Birthday" workflow in the brand's communication strategy works steadily and generates 4% of sales from all triggers. This is what the trigger email looked like:

To improve the results, the marketing team decided to expand the chain and communicate with those who ignored the holiday campaign. If the customer did not make a purchase, adidas continued to encourage them for a week after their birthday.

Solution

The existing "Happy Birthday" trigger workflow was augmented with the following blocks:

• 12-day timer
• Condition to check whether the contact placed an order within these 12 days
• An additional message with a reminder email if the contact has not placed an order

In addition, we decided to use a new communication channel — widgets.

Widgets are additional website interface elements that display important content to visitors, engage them, collect contacts, feedback, and additional data, etc.

Configuring a Widget

To expand the chain, marketers created an informer in the form of a floating window. It's easy to do with Yespo's drag-n-drop builder: just drag and drop the components you need and customize them.

The next step is to select the segment to display the informer. In the display settings, it's necessary to select a group of contacts that meet certain conditions.

The following conditions were set up for the adidas widget:

• Include:
  • All contacts with email.
  • Birthday today, yesterday, 2-7 days ago.
• Exclude:
  • Did not specify a date of birth.
  • Made a purchase in the last 7 days.

This is how a contact group is formed in CDP Yespo:

CDP Yespo allows for the display (or non-display) of widgets to conditional groups that can be formed in real time. This functionality enables you to make more precise offers that are more likely to interest a particular person and lead to conversion.

Read more about creating segments in the instruction.

In addition to targeting specific segments, you can customize the general conditions for displaying each widget on your website. For the "Happy Birthday" widget, we chose the following:

• show once a day;
• only to the selected segment;
• visitor spent on the website 5 seconds;
• consider Showing in sequence using Silent interval to avoid showing many widgets within a certain time frame (more details here);
• show on all devices;
• on any pages;
• do not limit by geolocation.

To ensure that the widget is displayed correctly, you can test the display conditions and appearance on the website in CDP.

Widgets are a very cool idea. Previously, similar solutions required a developer and a lot of time to implement. And in a time of war, when planned activities can be postponed or canceled at any moment, it would be entirely unprofitable. I like that the functionality is constantly evolving. I would like to see the gamification features sooner, because it is very difficult to find high-quality services at an affordable price on the market now.

Email Marketer at Omnicore

To display widgets, you only need to install a universal script on your website, which is also used for web tracking in CDP Yespo.

Results

So, what results did adidas achieve from July to December 2023 by using the new solution? 

Expanding the reminder chain for the birthday discount exceeded expectations and almost doubled sales from the trigger by 46%.

The widget generates about 40% of sales of this campaign.

It is precisely the targeting of widgets that allows for making accurate offers that lead to conversions for the business. Comparing the adidas "Happy Birthday" widget with other widgets, its CTR is 37% higher. Moreover, the sales conversion of the targeted widget is more than three times higher.

The adidas example shows that there are always opportunities to improve the triggers: add new communication channels, increase the number of these communications, and segment the audience. 

Using a widget for customers' birthdays is just one of many effective strategies. Targeting widgets to contact segments using customer data allows you to maximize the personalization of your website and offers. This impacts customer satisfaction and overall conversion positively.

If you have any questions about using widgets for your website, book a demo with CDP Yespo specialists. We will cover all the capabilities of this functionality for your business.

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