A Glimpse into Café Du Cycliste’s Retention Marketing Strategy

Last month, our CEO Ivan penned an article for Internet Retailing about why it’s so dangerous for today’s retail brands to focus all of their marketing efforts on acquisition and one-off sales, in the blind hope this will keep generating enough revenue to stay afloat.

The crux of the article is this: if tomorrow’s ecommerce marketers want to thrive, they need to ditch these tactics and adopt a more customer-centric approach. And when Ivan says “customer”, he means the individual. Because that’s what your customers are: individuals.

The foundation of Ometria, as a platform, has always been to enable retailers to send meaningful marketing messages that resonate with every single recipient.

We work with retailers that are no longer willing to spend time sending generic, unpersonalised emails to their entire email list —over and over again.

Nice-based cycling apparel brand Café du Cycliste is one of those brands. Here’s a glimpse into their journey with us so far.

Le problème? A batch and blast approach

Pre-Ometria, Café du Cycliste’s email marketing consisted mainly of sending one-size-fits-all messages to its subscriber base.

But, for a brand offering high-quality, technically brilliant cycling apparel, it wanted an email marketing strategy as sophisticated, impressive and bespoke as the product it was offering—one that could consolidate all of its customer data into one place and use it to personalise correspondence.

… Problem was, the brand was limited by its technology at the time, and was unable to incorporate the behavioural data necessary to create bespoke emails.

La solution? A retention marketing mindset

Calling upon Ometria’s expertise in retention marketing, the cycle brand was able to set up the following:

1) A programme of advanced automated campaigns across the customer journey, including: a personalised welcome campaign based on the channel the recipient came through, a ‘complete the look’ post-purchase campaign with lifestyle imagery and recommendations based on the individual customer’s taste profile, personalised cart and browse abandonment campaigns and, finally, customer ‘win-back’ campaigns.

Welcome Campaign

Post-purchase Campaign

The brand’s automation emails have seen a click-to-open rate of 39% & a 3.35% conversion rate.

2) Newsletters personalised with insight from Ometria’s intelligence layer, with content
tailored to the recipient’s gender, location, and whether they’ve recently engaged with
the brand.

3) Targeted emails to specific customer segments—for example, those who had shopped in its London store—with relevant content.

… Les résultats

Since Café du Cycliste started using our platform almost two years ago, it has experienced roughly:

• 49% growth in total customers shopping
• 22% uplift in repeat rate
• 14% increase in customer lifetime value (CLV)

And we’re only just getting started.

Avant la lettre

The secret to Café du Cycliste’s success is its forward-thinking mindset.

The brand detected early on the need to (a) develop a natural rapport with customers, treating them like individuals instead of numbers, and (b) focus on long-term growth, not short-term wins.

We’re extremely happy that Ometria has helped the team with this so far, and look forward to the exciting journey that still lies ahead.

Want to read the brand’s case study in full, as well as other retailers’ experiences with Ometria? Check out our “Customers” page here.