Boutique Arthur Leverages Sendinblue to Accelerate Its Online Sales

Adapting to meet an increasing demand in online sales

At the forefront of the digital revolution, the ready-to-wear sector is in constant transformation. Industry players must therefore constantly adapt to the needs of customers who are increasingly demanding in terms of quality and experience.

As a daily Sendinblue user since January 2020 for email campaigns and live chat, Baptiste Bataille, e-commerce and digital strategy manager of Boutique Arthur, shares his experience with the platform.

During the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, the leader in the French underwear market experienced an unprecedented increase in online sales. Boutique Arthur relied on the Sendinblue platform to help meet this exceptional demand while simultaneously building new customer loyalty strategies to plan for the future.

A marketing tool to accelerate their e-commerce strategy

To speed up the rollout of his e-commerce strategy, Baptiste was looking for a user-friendly tool that would allow his team to go above and beyond when sending their weekly newsletter.

For Baptiste, a drag-and-drop email editor as well as the ability to integrate with Shopify were core requirements.

Disappointed by complex tools with features that were hard to understand, Baptiste turned to Sendinblue, which offered a user-friendly interface at an affordable price as well as dedicated support within the framework of the Enterprise plan.

For Bataille, the possibilities offered by the automation feature were also highly attractive. “We can work the entire customer lifecycle, easily creating our own scenarios.”

Going faster and further with marketing automation

As soon as the contract was signed, the Sendinblue team got in contact with the agency used by Boutique Arthur to start configuring the tool. “Getting started was simple. A tag was enough and after we were able to build our first template!” says Bataille.

As an email deliverability expert, Sendinblue ensured that the IP address allocated to Boutique Arthur was warmed up by sending batches of 1,000 emails during the first month. Warming up the IP address is an essential step for the successful deployment of an email marketing tool, as it allows recipients to gradually get used to receiving emails from a new IP address, thus avoiding being blacklisted.

Once the transition was complete and the integration with their CRM set up, the e-commerce team started taking action. Pleased with the tool’s ease-of-use, they quickly built automation scenarios to cover most of the customer journey, taking advantage of particular milestone events such as birthday, specific page visits or even to engage inactive customers.

The team is supported at every stage by their Customer Success Manager. “Having a dedicated CSM is particularly useful for us as a start-up, especially for setting up scenarios and learning to be more autonomous on the platform“.

To take their segmentation and customer knowledge even further, the team has also set up a questionnaire to qualify its database and better understand customers’ preferences.

“What’s my favorite feature from Sendinblue? The creation of email campaigns, without question! In just about 10 minutes I can have a campaign ready to go thanks to the drag & drop editor,“ says Baptiste Bataille. As an example, he explains that for a sales event in September, he was able to adapt his newsletter template very easily to create around twenty different campaigns, simply editing certain elements of the original version.

12% of online sales now come from the newsletter channel

Beyond the significant increase in loungewear sales during lockdown, the team has already noted a strong increase in the recurrence of online purchases since using Sendinblue, which went up by 8% between March and September 2020.

Among the performance indicators they monitor, the e-commerce team tracks the share of sales generated by newsletters compared to other marketing channels. “We consider weekly newsletters as a fully-fledged acquisition channel. We have seen a clear increase, since 12% of our online sales now come from this channel, versus a previous 5%.” 

With many more objectives in sight, the pioneer brand is already thinking about what to do next to capitalize on the successes of 2020. For Boutique Arthur, the next steps include further optimization of the automation scenarios by exploring the analytical part in more depth and extending actions to their brick and mortar shops.

Now that the team is perfectly comfortable with the email marketing tool, Bataille plans to investigate the other features included in the Enterprise plan, for example by integrating their cashier platform with Sendinblue, to offer a richer experience to customers who visit their physical stores. At Sendinblue, we look forward to continuing to support them in their growth and their innovation endeavors!