Leading Multinational Retailer Currys Accelerates its Digital Strategy

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Currys strives to be as relevant and unique as it can be at every step of the customer journey. By viewing every interaction through the customer lens, the leading omnichannel electrical retailer aims to build end-to-end multi-touchpoint experiences designed to dazzle.  

Challenge

Currys’ 2019 “Black Tag Event” was underpinned by a massive consumer insight project. Currys worked with Proximity, its trusted customer experience agency, to survey over 17,000 people in the UK for quantitative and qualitative data to give the most robust segmentation selection in Currys’ history.  

Solution

This empowered Currys to create a cohesive Black Tag Event campaign based around customer intent and personalization, drawing from data such as purchasing behaviors, motivations, proof points, and barriers. For instance, it found that millennials saw Black Friday as an opportunity to replace or upgrade products, while high-affluence customers and families prioritized gifting in their Black Friday spending.  

A data-driven, customer-centered approach to Currys’ 2019 Black Tag Event resulted in personalized, highly targeted email campaigns, combining the power of Phrasee’s AI-generated language and Movable Ink’s personalized creative visual content. Dynamic, modular blocks within Currys’ campaign emails supported personalized hero messaging, product recommendations, product categories, and reasons to buy based on each customer’s intent and need states, along with boosting email frequency from two a week to one a day throughout the Black Tag Event, leading to Currys’ highest email open rates ever. 

Currys Black Tag event in mobile inbox

Impact

Currys scored incredible results with its 2019 Black Tag Event, including a 93% click rate uplift, a 42% open rate uplift, and a 102% increase in campaign revenue. This fantastic revenue uplift was the result of a 21% conversion rate uplift and a 16% uplift in online conversions, leading to a 29x ROI for this campaign. 

 To reach its next level of personalization, Currys optimizes its omnichannel strategy using Phrasee’s AI content. The average cart abandonment rate across industries is almost 70%, amounting to a lot of lost revenue. Having already accelerated its CRM strategy and broken ROI records across its promotional campaigns, Currys turned its focus to transforming its trigger campaigns with AI-optimized content, converting abandoned carts into sales with pitch-perfect messages, sent to the right people, at the right time. 

Using advanced machine learning, Phrasee constantly experiments with multiple AI-generated subject lines, all of which are compliant, on brand and personalized with dynamic tags in Adobe Campaign, to determine the variant most likely to convert abandoned baskets. By continuously swapping out lower-performing variants and distributing the highest performers to Currys’ abandoned cart customers, Currys can ensure it maximizes the impact of every email. 

“It’s been amazing to truly combine transactional marketing with real-time optimization by integrating Adobe Message Centre with Phrasee. It really shows the value of AI-powered, event-based messaging.”
David Pallant – Senior CRM Personalization Manager, Currys

The impact of optimized abandoned cart messages

Integrating Phrasee with the Adobe Campaign Message Center, Currys achieved a huge 56% open rate uplift, double the website visits, and a 9% conversion rate uplift, resulting in an impressive £2.5m ($3.4m) increase in yearly incremental online revenue. All through Phrasee’s AI-optimized content!

Currys’ longstanding relationship with Phrasee has empowered it to transform its entire end-to-end customer journey, from promotional campaigns such as its “Black Tag Event” (for Black Friday) to its ongoing abandoned cart conversion efforts … with truly outstanding results.

“I don’t know what marketers are waiting for – one subject line change and I’m achieving a 9% conversion uplift and £2.5m revenue impact. All with the single click of a button!”
Saul Lopes – former Head of CRM, Personalisation, and Loyalty, Currys

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