The e-commerce stack for more turnover. With Reloadify, power and ease of use go hand in hand.
Then AanhangwagenDirect is the right place for you. A webshop specializing in trailer parts. Some would say: A small market. Instead Merin Eggink of AanhangwagenDirect found a challenge in this area. We talked with him about how AanhangwagenDirect grew to be a serious market leader in this area.
AanhangwagenDirect was founded in 2011. “Together with my partner, although our adventure really started in 2008. At that point we founded an ice rink rental shop.”, Merin tells us. Ice rinks are a seasonal product, so Merin was searching for something that better fit their company. The idea to start an online shop came quickly to them. “I then started to research various niche markets.” says Merin. In the past he had worked for a trailer manufacturer and put up a network of dealers. “I was still in contact with them, so it seemed to be a logical market to expand in.”
“We started small: the both of us worked from home and we had a small warehouse where we stored our stack.” At this point AanhangwagenDirect has twenty employees working for it. Merin tells us that he enjoys growing the company in an organic manner, only because the business is doing well.
At AanhangwagenDirect they’re constantly looking for ways for different departments to work together to better serve the end customer. In this way e-mail marketing automation supports the customer service by stopping repeating questions from reaching them.
“A good example of this is the fact that we sell a product that we obtained from a different company two years ago, with the issue that the information of the old company is still on the product. With that in mind it’s easy to send out an automated e-mail with Reloadify. With the idea that if the customer orders this specific product, the customer is assured that it’s the right product even with the differing information. With the filter rules in reloadify this is a snap to set up. And with it we help both the customer and ourselves. The customers knows that they are getting the right product and our customer serivce won’t be bothered with calls that ‘possibly’ a wrong product has been delivered. A true win-win situation.” so we’re told by a beaming Merin
“We see that the market in our sector is fairly saturated. This makes it extra important to differentiate yourself. And the way we do that is by making our own content like newsletters, but we also produce video content.”
“However”, Merin says, “for us it’s also the fact that we’re expanding abroad. Our potential to grow is to establish ourselves in Europe. In addition to our expansion in Germany, we”re planning to expand to France, the UK and eventually Scandinavia.”
“For about a year we’ve been putting emphasis on campaigns with extra how-to content and we’re seeing that this is well received by our customers. This contributes to the air of authority on our market; we have the knowledge and the know-how. And we go further than just selling products to our customers.”
“What makes Reloadify unique for us is the fact that in a simple way we can duplicate our campaigns and roll it out faster in different countries and languages.”
With the growth of AanhangwagenDirect, the desire to do e-mail marketing in house became ever stronger. The e-mail marketing packet that AanhangwagenDirect used to use, it was necessary to constantly call on the technical marketing party to roll out new campaigns. “The unique thing about Reloadify is the fact that it’s specifically built to support webshops so all the technical limitations have already been taken care of. Without the help of a programmer we can connect and have direct access to all data from our webshop, down to product and order level.”
“Our experience with the onboarding process with Reloadify was very positive. It was nice that from the start we talked with someone who had knowledge of both the software and e-mail marketing. All of our questions were answered immediately and any ‘concerns’ that I might’ve had were wiped away. The fact that we were talking about the subject-matter was nice. This ensures that there’s no noise and that any substantive questions are answered without having to wait for weeks on an answer. This is why we ultimately chose to use Reloadify.”
“All the expansions and features were described in perfect detail. Our webshop is based on Lightspeed and the connection with Reloadify is working incredibly well. There’s no need for any external programs to make everything work and all the campagnes that we had running on our old software were copied and put into Reloadify instead. This caused us to have a beautiful and quick start with Reloadify.”
Merin finds that the biggest advantage of using Reloadify is the fact that they’re never held back by the technology and are able to do everything themselves. “Before we used to think of campaigns, make them and then put them into motion. With Reloadify all of these steps have come together. This makes it so we switch campaigns faster, by creating the campaigns ourselves, by looking for the cross connections ourselves, without needing to contact an external technical party . So in short: we can do everything ourselves, while retaining all the functionalities that we had with a company that provided custom work.”
Besides sending out standard newsletters in bulk, has it been a bigger point for AanhangswagenDirect to set up retention campaigns. “When our customers buy a certain product usually additional information can be given about it. For example, the way you install certain products.”
“At the moment we have hired Ruben to set up all the campaigns and newsletter, which is going swimmingly. And, everything works a bit better when someone is at the office working on it. Ruben started at AanhangwagenDirect as a graduation intern and he fit in well. Ever since then he’s been responsible for planning content and e-mail marketing. At the moment his work is focused on setting up the retention e-mails.”
“We’re hard at work to find any cross connections to find out where we can make profit. For example: if our customers have bought a product from a certain category then the customer might possibly be interested in a product from a different category.”
“To give us more insight into this, we are currently searching for other good software for the storage management system of our warehouse. With the intention to see which products are sold at which times and if maybe we can look at each season and hook in on this. Or to see which products are usually sold together. Getting these insights at the moment has been quite a challenge, but it’s the steps we need to take next.”
Send personal emails which will actually make your customers happy.