SwissCommerce Manages Email Marketing for Its Online Stores with Brevo’s Multi-account Solution

Centralizing SwissCommerce's online stores thanks to Brevo's multi-account solution

SwissCommerce founds or acquires e-commerce businesses for niche markets. The company focuses on open, under-utilized market segments in which a managed online shop with a professional set-up can quickly become the market leader. In total, the company has already set up 20 e-commerce shops and continues to support them with marketing, human resources and accounting, as well as logistics and IT.

The fact that SwissCommerce has built up 20 online shops and continues to manage their marketing needs made it particularly important for the company to ensure the stores’ email marketing was kept strictly separate. “We have tried out numerous email providers, but Brevo simply had the edge, especially in terms of managing multiple accounts within one single interface,” says CRM Manager Thomas Hirsbrunner.

An intuitive platform with an ideal price-performance ratio

Hirsbrunner explains, “We compared several platforms and tested various email providers, but they quickly became too expensive because of our strong growth.” Brevo charges based on the number of emails sent rather than for the number of contacts. This billing model makes it easier for users to manage and control their costs. “It was important to us that the price-performance ratio matched our expectations and that a clean integration was possible”, says Hirsbrunner.

He adds, “It was also very nice to see that Brevo was keen on having us as a customer as well and was interested in our business, which laid the groundwork for a good relationship.”

In addition, Brevo is fully GDPR-compliant and hosts its servers in Europe, thus ensuring maximum data protection, which was another important factor for SwissCommerce.

A strong, easy-to-use multi-account solution

The Brevo platform offered all the functions that SwissCommerce was looking for at a reasonable price. The multi-account solution, which allows companies to centralize  activities of their business units and brands in one single place, played a key role in winning over SwissCommerce. Brevo’s multi-account solution is ideal for businesses and agencies that want to manage multiple accounts within one organization. SwissCommerce manages the master account and can therefore also access the numerous subaccounts of each online store separately. 

“The migration was quick and smooth, unlike the other tools we had tested previously. We were able to do a great part of the set-up ourselves, often without help from our IT department”, says Hirsbrunner. Links to Shopware and Minubo were also quick to set up via plugins. This meant that SwissCommerce could continue to use the user data from the various stores through Shopware and, for example, collect data on which contact viewed which product on which website. Similarly, integrating Minubo allowed SwissCommerce to use all this customer data to create highly specific segments seamlessly on the Brevo platform. Thanks to integrations like these, SwissCommerce is able to make use of such vital data for their brands’ personalized emails and retargeting campaigns.

SwissCommerce has been using Brevo for over a year now, primarily for sending out newsletters and transactional emails as well as for marketing automation – always in conjunction with the multi-account solution.

Hirsbrunner explains: “For transactional emails, we only have to set up a corresponding workflow in the platform once. After that, everything runs automatically.” SwissCommerce sends out these kinds of emails for everything relating to the ordering process. Therefore, the company uses “trigger events” for example order or shipping confirmations. For each of its online stores, SwissCommerce sends out a newsletter in German or French two or three times a week to tens of thousands of subscribers. As a result, the company sends out around 900 newsletters a year.

Brevo’s marketing automation features ensure that certain steps in the process require no further intervention from Hirsbrunner’s team. The team has not only set up automated workflows for newsletters and confirmation emails, but has also created additional scenarios, such as abandoned shopping cart alerts. If customers place a product in an online store’s shopping cart but leave the site without buying the product immediately, they receive an automated email the following day. This reminds them to complete their purchase and displays the product they selected in the email. The email also includes a direct link to the corresponding shopping cart so that the recipient can complete their purchase quickly and easily. The SwissCommerce team uses Shopware data to do this, which is why it was vital to integrate this tool. 

SwissCommerce also uses data obtained via Minubo for its reactivation campaigns. The workflow automatically creates a weekly segment of inactive customers, who are then sent an email with a discount code in order to re-engage them. Birthday emails are also sent out as a way of staying in touch with customers and increasing their loyalty.

Brevo’s contact segmentation function is also used in all the email campaigns mentioned above. This is to ensure that users only receives relevant content that matches their interests. For this reason, all online shops that SwissCommerce helps to manage have their own specific target group.

Personalized email campaigns with open rates of up to 30%

Thomas Hirsbrunner and his team are delighted with the results so far: “It is an excellent platform for a company with our kind of structure. The pricing is attractive and in line with our budget. For us, it’s essential that the data from different online stores stays separate. This would be very difficult to manage with just one account, so the multi-account solution is ideal for us, it’s both fast and user-friendly”.

The marketing team sets up separate newsletter and email campaigns for each store. So it is vital to be able to test them separately to find out what works for which stores. This allows the individual online shops to learn from each other and avoid mistakes. The newsletter templates are very similar in structure, which makes the testing easier. Certain content and banners are used in the newsletters of more than one store. SwissCommerce created these templates in the Brevo platform using Brevo’s handy drag-and-drop editor. The newsletters have a deliverability rate of almost 100% and an excellent open rate of between 20% and 30%.