Metro: Optimizing email personalization to drive engagement
Mandate
Every week, Metro and its banners send emails and newsletters to their subscribers in Quebec, Ontario, and New Brunswick. That means that nearly 5 million personalized newsletters must be sent out every week.
Since 2007, Metro has counted on us to meet its need for high-volume production and achieve the following goals:
- Send dozens of emails and newsletters to over a million recipients every week
- Optimize the user’s email experience
- Improve customer engagement and loyalty
- Promote Metro’s services
- Boost sales of various products
- Accompany users through their everyday buying cycle
Execution – Digital operations
Creating an optimized production cycle
Metro’s offers are updated once a week in line with multiple promotional and activation plans. These plans involve both sending emails and updating content on metro.ca. A high volume of weekly changes must therefore be made concurrently to provide a consistent user experience—that is, to ensure that what shows up in a user’s inbox reflects what is on the website. The production process that we have put in place allows us to meet Metro’s requirements and deliver a flawless result every week.
Identifying the most relevant content for each target audience
We’ve also developed a method to optimize email personalization. By leveraging data, testing, and best practices in the field, we have been able to determine which content is most appealing to which target audience, and in what order elements should be presented to drive engagement and conversions.
This allows us to continuously monitor newsletter performance and quickly adapt when needed to help Metro deliver the best possible relational experience for its customers. We are also able to use the brand’s design standards to highlight key information across all communications.
Meeting personalization needs
Consumers have increasingly high expectations in terms of the relevance and quality of the emails they receive. Fortunately, technology and data now allow us to create highly targeted mailings.
In order to provide the most personalized experience possible for Metro’s customers, we helped the company segment its audiences and create email templates with variables and conditions.
Emails can be personalized based on the following criteria:
- Shopping cart activity
- Interests
- Province
- Preferred store
- Loyalty program membership
- User behaviour on the brand’s website
As a result, we are able to send fully personalized newsletters to consumers, whether they are vegetarians or carnivores, live in Quebec or Ontario, speak French or English, like brown bread or white bread, or prefer receiving promotions or tips and tricks.
Not only can we personalize the content of each email, but we can also send coupons and discounts tailored to the preferences and buying habits of every recipient.
Our expertise in newsletter production and mailing management allows us to help Metro segment its customer groups, automate its communications, and personalize its mailings. We deliver an impressive volume of emails week after week, without ever compromising on quality. It’s a lot of content and communications to manage under very tight deadlines, but we always manage to optimize the email experience for the user and streamline the production experience for our client. Metro has entrusted us with its digital operations since 2007.
Maude Laurin, Director of Digital Production and Operations