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Witt Weiden, founded in 1907, is a German mail-order house for clothing with a thriving presence in Europe, Russia, and the USA. Catering mainly to women aged 50+, they have generated more than €820 million in revenue in 2017, with a year-over-year growth of 4%. Witt Weiden sends around 250,000 packages every day from the small town of Weiden. The company is part of the OTTO Group, one of the world’s largest retailers operating in 30 countries with online sales of €7.9 billion.
The Challenge: Witt Weiden’s performance in the textile mail-order business is highly correlated with their marketing team’s email abilities. The company’s email marketing campaigns encompass at least 14 newsletters a week. Sustaining the company’s success means executing complex and challenging email marketing campaigns for its eight different brands operating in several countries.
The primary challenge, however, lay with their email marketing platform that was extremely time-consuming. More specifically, it was necessary to manually upload email lists at the beginning of every day, as there was no option to automate emails. Using another tool for newsletters, the team was required to copy-paste HTML code for every email into their email marketing tool. With all these disjointed tools, the chance of encountering errors and issues was very high. Email marketing managers were becoming frustrated, as they wanted to work on creative email ideas, but instead were bogged down by uploading files and troubleshooting HTML code.
According to the company’s Email Marketing Manager Peter Scholzuk, a seasoned marketing professional with 8 years of email marketing experience, Witt Weiden needed a much more efficient content management platform. Scholzuk emphasized that you can have the best marketing strategy, but if you have an incompetent partner or an inefficient tool, those plans might as well not exist. Therefore, this new tool needed to optimize the email marketing campaigns at all stages (i.e. creation, deliverability, management), as well as significantly improve the team’s productivity.
Ensure optimal deliverability of emails
Replace manual HTML email creation process with a drag-and-drop capability
Implement effective and easy-to-use API connections compatible with Witt Weiden’s proprietary CMS platform
Generate automated reports about email marketing campaigns on a weekly basis
The Solution: After a thorough evaluation of the tools proposed by several providers, Peter Scholzuk and his team chose Mapp Digital as their digital marketing platform. Powered by two solutions, Mapp Engage for email marketing and Mapp Connect to integrate with Witt Weiden’s in-house CMS, Peter’s team was able to get quickly up and running.
The platform has enabled the email marketing team to create newsletters by setting up a template once and then reusing it through the drag-and-drop capability, generating a variety of designs easily. With a unique time-saving process, Mapp Engage has done away with the need to code from scratch each time to create multiple newsletters. Mapp Engage also has an efficient reporting system embedded that generates automated weekly reports based on specified KPIs and stated information. Both internal newsletters and external communications with affiliate partners are now done using Mapp Engage, allowing complex email campaigns to be effortlessly executed.
Since its implementation, the growth has been phenomenal and the company is currently sending millions of emails every month. With Mapp Engage, Witt Weiden is planning future digital marketing campaigns that will provide customers with tailored content depending on their location.
The Results: Mapp Engage made it possible for Witt Weiden to automate its email marketing campaigns, putting an end to the manual handling of HTML code that caused numerous problems. Witt Weiden’s weekly newsletters have doubled from 15 to 32 on average after the implementation of the new solution. This has had a significant impact on the revenues generated through these email campaigns, with a significant increase of 56 percent.
Mapp Engage has lived up to the expectations of the email marketing team when it comes to both volume and deliverability, thus ensuring better reach and increased personalization of messages.
Last but not least, working with Mapp Engage, Peter Scholzuk and his team didn’t have to worry about modifying their data processing mechanisms or any other documentation-related issues when GDPR arrived. The email marketing operations carried out through the platform automatically comply with all the regulations enacted by the European Union.
Team productivity up by 42% due to the streamlined newsletter creation process
Number of email marketing campaigns has increased from 15 to 32 per week
Revenue generated via email marketing campaigns has increased by 56%
Significant increase in deliverability of emails to customers and prospects
More than 20 million emails sent monthly
Download the full case study here: mapp.com/case-studies/witt-weiden.pdf
This article was first published by MAPP. Permission to use has been granted by the publisher.