AanhangwagenDirect

AanhangwagenDirect was founded in 2011. "Together with my associate, our adventure actually began back in 2008. That's when we started as an ice rink rental company," Merin says. This is a seasonal product, and so Merin was looking for something that would suit them better. The idea soon came up to start an online shop. "I then started looking into different niche markets," he says. In the past, he had worked for a trailer manufacturer and set up a dealer network for it. "I was still in contact with that, so this seemed like a logical market," he says.

"We started small: we both worked from home and we had a small shed where we stored our stock." Since then, AanhangwagenDirect has grown to twenty employees. Merin says he enjoys growing organically: purely because business is going well.

Serving customers personally

At AanhangwagenDirect, we are constantly looking at how different departments can work together to better serve the end customer. For example, e-mail marketing automation supports customer service to avoid repetitive inquiries.

"A good example is: we have a product in stock that was taken over by another company two years ago, however, the old company information is still on the product. It is then easy to send out an automated e-mail with Reloadify. When the customer orders this product, the customer needs to know in time that this is correct and it is the right product. With filter rules in Reloadify, this can be set up in no time. This way we help the customer and ourselves: the customer knows he is going to receive the right product and our customer service doesn't get a call that "possibly" the wrong product was delivered. So a real win-win situation," Merin says glowingly.

Becoming a market leader in Europe

"We see in our sector that the market is fairly saturated. So it's extra important to stand out... And we do that very well by creating content ourselves such as newsletter content, but also video content."

"But," says Merin, "for us, that's also in expanding abroad. The growth potential for us is in Europe. We are moving to expand into France, England and eventually Scandinavia in addition to Germany."

"We have been deploying campaigns with additional how-to content for a year now and we see that this is very well received by customers. This contributes to our image of authority in the market: we have the knowledge and expertise. And we go beyond just selling our customers the products. What makes Reloadify unique in our eyes is that we can duplicate our campaigns in a simple way and thus accelerate rollout in other countries and languages."

AanhangwagenDirect and email marketing

As AanhangwagenDirect grew, so did the desire to do email marketing in-house. However, with the old email marketing package AanhangwagenDirect used, it was necessary to always rely on a technical marketing party to roll out campaigns. "The unique thing about Reloadify is that it was built specifically for online stores and so all the technical stumbling blocks have already been overcome. Without the help of a programmer, we can connect and have instant access to all the data from our webshop, down to the product and order level."

"We also experienced Reloadify's onboarding as very positive. It is nice to talk to someone right at the start who has all the knowledge, both of the software and of email marketing. All questions were answered immediately and all my "concerns" that I had were addressed. It's nice to talk about the content. That ensures that you don't have any noise and content questions are answered without having to wait weeks for an answer. Because of that, we ended up choosing Reloadify."

"All extensions and features are incredibly well described. Our webshop runs on Lightspeed and the link with Reloadify works incredibly well. We don't need any external links to make everything work. We took over all the campaigns we had running with our old email marketing software and put them into Reloadify. So we are making a nice, fast start with Reloadify."

Merin believes the biggest advantage of Reloadify is that they can do everything themselves and not be held back by technology. "We were first thinking up a lot of campaigns, creating them and then setting them up. And in Reloadify this all comes together. This allows us to move faster now, by creating the campaigns ourselves, finding the cross links ourselves without a technical party in between. So in short, we can do everything ourselves, while retaining all the functionality we had with a custom party."

Retention campaigns and making connections

In addition to sending standard newsletters in bulk, AanhangwagenDirect is increasingly creating retention campaigns. "When our customers have purchased a certain product, we can often provide additional information about it. For example, on how to assemble certain parts."

"We now have Ruben to set up and create all the campaigns and newsletters, which goes very well. And, it switches gears a bit easier when someone is sitting directly in your office. Ruben once joined AanhangwagenDirect as a graduation intern and that went very well. Since then, he has been responsible for content planning and email marketing. He is now very active in setting up retention emails."

"We are busy looking for cross-links to see where profits can be made. So: when customers from one category have bought a product, the customer may be interested in a product from another category."

"To make this more insightful, we are currently looking for good software for our inventory management in the warehouse. From there it is possible to see which products are sold when and whether we can respond smartly to this per season, for example. Or which products are often ordered together. Getting those insights now is quite a challenge, but that is one of our next steps to make."