About Willemse
Founded in 1962, Willemse is a French online garden centre specialising in the sale of plants, seeds, bulbs and gardening products. With over 60 years of horticultural expertise, the company operates four brands across four countries and delivers from northern France.
With over 3,000 products in its catalogue, Willemse serves a community of around 2 million customers, ranging from novice gardeners to the most experienced, with a core target audience in their fifties. Having built its history on catalogue sales, the company has very recently completed its transition to a 100% digital model, having sent out its last paper catalogue a year ago.
Main challenges
Following its digital transformation, Willemse was managing a database of 2 million contacts in a standardised manner. To make full use of this data asset, the retailer set itself a two-fold objective:
- Moving away from mass communication: shifting from a uniform, one-size-fits-all approach to a hyper-personalised experience, based on segmentation, behaviour and the context of each customer (region, climate, product interests)
- Gaining business autonomy: reducing the historically high reliance on IT teams by bringing together campaigns, segmentation and automation within a single tool that can be operated and developed directly by marketing teams.
- Ensuring the deliverability of the mailing list: a significant proportion of Willemse’s core target audience uses email addresses subject to stricter filtering rules. Ensuring that communications reached these inboxes was an essential prerequisite for activating the mailing list.
Why Positive User ?
Willemse chose Positive User for its ability to bring together campaign management (email, SMS, etc.), advanced segmentation and marketing automation on a single platform, all of which can be managed independently by business teams without having to rely on IT every time.
Beyond the tool itself, it was the close relationship with the Positive User teams that guided the decision: the solution was co-developed with Willemse. This support proved decisive in two key projects: the migration of 2 million contacts from disparate databases and tools, and deliverability, involving direct engagement with email providers to ensure the delivery of emails following the tightening of their filtering rules.
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Positive User in daily operations: activating data at the right moment
Willemse’s teams’ use of the platform is now based on three strategic pillars:
- Contextualised welcome and real-time personalisation:
The first scenario rolled out is the welcome pack, which is tailored from the very first email according to the new customer’s context: their geographical location (a customer on the Mediterranean coast is not welcomed in the same way as a customer in the Netherlands) and their interests (vegetable gardening vs. houseplants).
Thanks to multi-item shopping baskets and long session durations, Positive User detects the visitor’s context very early on in a non-declarative way and personalises the on-site experience in real time.
- Cross-selling and up-selling through recommendations:
In a market where buying a plant marks the start of a journey that can last several years, Willemse provides context-specific recommendations at the point of purchase and afterwards, in the form of product advice (e.g. a customer buying products for their vegetable garden in February is advised on fertiliser, compost and companion plants when the season arrives).
By targeting the right segment at the right time, rather than increasing pressure, the targeted addition of one or two products per order improves the brand’s sales performance.
- Reactivating inactive customers and managing sales pressure:
RFM segmentation enables us to target each customer at the moment when they are most receptive and to avoid overselling. Dormant customers or those who make just one purchase a year (e.g. a vegetable garden customer who is not very receptive in the middle of winter) are reactivated at the right time, by alternating between product-focused and brand-relationship communications to build a lasting connection.
Goals & Achievements
- Successfully migrate 2 million contacts from siloed databases and tools to a single platform
- Ensure deliverability by restoring email delivery to email providers with strict rules, which make up a significant proportion of its core target audience.
- Empower marketing teams by moving away from batch and asynchronous processing that requires IT team intervention, and moving towards real-time or scheduled activations
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