NIVEA (part of Beiersdorf Global AG), one of the best-known brands in the beauty and skincare industry, has been committed to innovation, sustainability, and reliability for 130 years. The brand, which is mainly sold in physical stores, focuses its online messaging on increasing brand consideration, preference, and loyalty.  

Since 2018, DEPT® has been working with Beiersdorf as their digital agency. In 2021 we became their European CRM strategic partner across 19 countries. Leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we help them create personalized experiences and increase local relevance.

For the usage of NIVEA’s newsletters, we created an AMPscript template within Salesforce, which can be used to automatically load different translations, content blocks, and design choices. 

This allows us to provide a personalized experience for all subscribers, in different countries, while only building and testing one email template. 

Using an AMPscript Email opens up many possibilities,

– Change the language and images

– Add or hide buttons

– Add or hide content blocks

– Choose the colour of the background and buttons

– Make the email-building process more efficient

After implementing this AMPscript, we calculated that we saved 15 hours per month.

In addition to the creative aspect of our collaboration, we use the content to steer toward performance objectives. Since all countries had common KPIs with different metrics, we plotted all disciplines on the DEPT® maturity model to have a realistic growth roadmap and strategy per country. Within this strategy, we have placed a strong focus on the ‘care’ phase, in which we deal with ‘well-known’ customers. 

This helps us circumvent the impact of the ‘death of the cookie ‘, as the focus on the ‘care’ phase gives us the opportunity to still personalize the customer journeys. As a result, we have managed to exceed all KPIs since the partnership began. 
 
To increase the first-party data from a Salesforce marketing automation perspective, we run acquisition campaigns to grow the database. We also create attractive and personalized content for subscribers to inspire them and reduce churn. Applying these tactics led to significant growth in database opt-ins and a churn reduction of 30%.

Results are driven by using and developing personalized content based on enriched profiles. This allows us to interact with subscribers based on their gender, age, skin type, and general content preferences. 

The shift to customer-centricity and personalization is supported by the migration to the full Salesforce CRM tool stack. We moved from a newsletter approach to a seamless customer journey. This is supported by customer life cycle programs from onboarding to loyalty, plus the use of AI (Einstein) tools and cases to optimize customer touchpoints.

Some of the journeys we helped create in Salesforce Marketing Cloud include  

– Churn journey (for users who have stopped ordering a product) 
– Onboarding journey (for new users) 
– Basic loyalty program (to encourage testing of new products and frequent purchases) 
– Skin type journey (An acne-prone skin type had different needs than an anti-aging skin type) 

From a search standpoint, we are constantly looking for ways to increase traffic to our own channels by integrating our brand into every stage of the customer journey. This means that we embrace the diversity of the target audience and create content for all genders, skin, and hair types for all types of questions.

Plus, we are constantly integrating new products and market trends (such as mineral sunscreen) into the content framework.