SeaSea turns to Custobar in gaining a more detailed and impactful view of customer data

SeaSea recently turned to Custobar to help fill a large gap between the business and its growing customer base. Since their partnership began, Custobar and SeaSea have worked together to provide the immediate and longer-term development needs of SeaSea and their customers.

Starting as a family-owned business in 1979, SeaSea is a leading boating supply business in Northern Europe and is the largest retailer of boating accessories with nearly 30 locations across Sweden. The company prides itself in offering both retail consumers and business customers a range of premium marine products and services at their guaranteed lowest prices.

A desire to know what their customers desire

Before embarking on their partnership with Custobar in 2017, their most significant challenge involved a large disconnect between them and their customers – a gap that had been impeding their business growth and impact efforts to nurturing the modern needs and expectations of their customers.

“Looking back, it was a struggle,” says Ola Olsson, E-Commerce Manager at SeaSea. “We had no product feed into our email system, meaning we couldn’t see our total customer lifetime value, and it was a complete unknown what products or how much individual customers were purchasing. In some cases, we didn’t even have a foundation to see if our customers had opened the emails from the campaigns we’d send, so we weren’t able to get an idea of how much or how little impact each was having. We had none of that.”

A whole new world of solutions with the right CDP

In 2016, it became clear to Ola and the SeaSea leadership that the company needed a more modern solution to provide the immediate and longer-term development needs of SeaSea and its customers. They considered a range of options before determining Custobar was exactly the partner they needed.

Custobar's platform has not only made us better but has made it possible for us to improve the customer experience.

Ola Olsson, E-Commerce Manager at SeaSea

Enter Custobar’s innovative Customer Data Platform, which has been helping to provide businesses in a range of industries better understand their customers more intimately and facilitating the use of that information to improve customer experiences while having to impact their bottom line.

Since the partnership began back in 2017, SeaSea has been able to better nurture its customer base, with a complete view courtesy of Custobar’s user-friendly, clear, visual dashboards and customized reports.

“In working with Custobar’s solution, it seemed that almost immediately we had the tools in place to give us a crystal-clear view of our customers,” says Ola. That had always been missing previously, and today it’s enabling us to see customers’ behaviors from the time they open an email to the time of purchase, providing us with a full view of their complete lifetime value to SeaSea.”

Exceptional results have set SeaSea up for future growth and opportunity

While email campaigns have been playing a significant part in SeaSea’s digital efforts, the full view of the customers’ needs has helped pave a more defined path for Ola and the SeaSea team and offer a more positive experience for their customers.

“Custobar's platform enables us to see the sales results of each email, meaning we have a true understanding of what products at SeaSea are drawing the most attention, which products are getting the most clicks and which ones’ customers tend to ignore,” says Ola. “Based on what our customers purchased the previous year, today we have the abilities and know-how to target emails with suggestions that are customer-specific.”

Custobar’s Customer Data Platform solution has opened a whole new world for us, allowing us to modify things based on what we can see is working versus what we can try to improve.

Ola Olsson, E-Commerce Manager at SeaSea

Cost savings have been one benefit of their more defined e-commerce approach. With a larger concentration on e-commerce efforts, SeaSea has reduced travel expenses from their sales teams. In addition, creating new campaigns and emails is completed in a fraction of the time compared to the amount of time and effort the SeaSea team had put into those before implementing the Customer Data Platform.

“Producing emails with the existing data from Custobar’s platform is something we’re able to do in just minutes,” says Ola. “In the past, what used to take two hours now takes us 15 minutes. For example, in a single day before lunch, I’m able to produce seven days’ worth of emails in what would previously take us two full days before. It’s saved us a tremendous amount of money and time and has made an impact in allowing us to be more productive than ever.”

SeaSea also had some unique development needs that Custobar worked together to create and implement into their platform.

“Custobar has been great to work with throughout our partnership, and their experts have always listened to our requests around our email platform and development needs,” says Ola. “With their help, today we have a standard solution in place that has worked tremendously well for us where we are embedding what we call stickers,” he explains. “These are attention-grabbing visuals overlayed within email images to align with certain products sales and campaigns. It's something that we had A/B tested and knew would work. And today, it's something that is working brilliantly for SeaSea.”

According to Aleksi Montonen, Head of Business Development at Custobar, the sticker feature is also helping other Custobar partners today. "While originally SeaSea's idea, we quickly realized how well the feature was working and have actually successfully incorporated similar implementations with some of our other customers' setups to help bring them additional value," he says.

Looking ahead to what’s next

While SeaSea doesn’t currently collect data from their physical retail locations, they are considering looking to Custobar in helping them develop a possible solution in the future.

“It comes down to us wanting to have more automated actions, depending on customer behavior,” says Ola. “We would like to have the data for the transactions of each physical retail store feed into Custobar’s Customer Data Platform, which we don’t currently have. If we know a customer bought something in a store, it would be great to have it tied to his customer data. If we had that in place, we could make full use of the automation, which makes it even more customer specifically targeted.”