Motoblouz: full throttle on the email channel with Dartagnan

Leader in online motorcycle parts and accessories sales for 15 years, Motoblouz ramped up its email marketing efforts by adopting Dartagnan’s email builder three years ago. This tool has won over the teams managing this channel and revitalized the CRM strategy.

Everything is running smoothly for Motoblouz, the French leader in motorcycle parts and accessories, created in 2004 by Thomas Thumerelle in the Lille metropolitan area. With a turnover of 66 million euros and 170 employees on board, the e-commerce company has built a solid reputation among more than a million biker customers across three countries (France, Italy, and Spain).

Why is this northern French company a leader in its sector? Because it masters the fundamentals of a specialized pure player:

• A highly varied product offering: nearly 400 major brands (and its own brands like Dexter for helmets or DXR for clothing);
• A sharp customer service: at Motoblouz, they don’t say “tele-advisors” but “moto-advisors,” as all employees are also two-wheel enthusiasts… and they have consistently won the Customer Service of the Year award in their category;
• An intimate knowledge of its market and customer base, enriched by data.

As with any company where marketing and customer relations drive growth, Motoblouz relies heavily on a key channel: email. For the past three years, Dartagnan’s email builder has helped its teams gain speed, creativity… and enjoyment! These gains translate into real commercial performance.

Email at Motoblouz: from a complex channel to a powerful and innovative tool

At Motoblouz, the 16-person marketing team operates across a wide scope:

• From acquisition to retention,
• From orchestrating the offer (operational marketing) to optimizing the “storefront” (e-merchandising),
• And including brand building, content creation, and visuals (with an integrated creative studio).

Within this team, email was long considered the “fifth wheel of the wagon,” notes Lolita Saint-Maxent, Motoblouz’s e-commerce & marketing director. The reason? The complexity of designing campaigns, due to the lack of a satisfactory tool… until the integration of Dartagnan’s email builder.

Before Dartagnan: a lot of time spent designing campaigns

“Historically, our emails were designed using content blocks created by the graphic studio, then integrated into an HTML template,” explains Lolita Saint-Maxent. “This method had two major flaws: the campaigns were not optimized for all readers (especially mobile), and even the slightest change took a lot of time.”

At Motoblouz (like any advertiser), the commercial animation plan is never set in stone: you need to be able to react to competitors’ promotions, price changes, or even the weather (which plays a huge role when selling motorcycle gear).

This meant having the already busy creative team rework campaigns, thus extending production times. “Designing emails was a source of tension within the team, particularly between the ‘business’ side and the creative studio,” notes Lolita Saint-Maxent.

An additional challenge was the international expansion Motoblouz embarked on in 2015, with two new markets to penetrate (Spain and Italy), which further increased the workload. “These are two countries with different buying behaviors from France, requiring adapted communications,” points out Lolita Saint-Maxent. “Unfortunately, these two countries often took a backseat due to time constraints…”

Click on the images to view the full emails

With Dartagnan: high-speed acceleration of processes

The marketing teams’ roadmap was clear: they needed to regain agility in designing email campaigns to increase the pace. With this in mind, Motoblouz adopted the Dartagnan solution in mid-2018.

The results speak for themselves! The teams have leveraged our email builder to double their productivity, now producing in a “typical” month:

• 10 different campaigns,
• Averaging 60 different compositions.

Teams reconciled (and more) with the email channel

The reason for this acceleration? It comes down to both the functionality of our email builder and its ease of use.

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A builder that streamlines campaign design

Dartagnan’s approach is to offer campaign designers maximum creative expression within the email builder to:

• Arrange content: tables, columns, rows…
• Design complete “blocks”: texts, images, buttons, animate and make content interactive: videos, animations, etc., and manage “fallbacks” for environments that don’t support them (e.g., displaying a GIF instead of a video).

As a result, the graphic designers only need to create the most impactful visuals and key elements of the brand’s graphic identity. The campaign managers then take control to manage the layout and integrate changes (price, promotion, wording…).

Dartagnan also offers two key features to save teams time:

• The ability to save a content block (e.g., a header with logo, menu, main image…) as a reusable module that can be adapted in any future campaign,
• The ability to rearrange content differently within the same campaign based on the reader: modify the design of a footer for mobile, not display an image below a certain screen size…

Ultimately, the Dartagnan solution significantly eases the workload for Motoblouz teams:

• The graphic studio focuses on high-value visual elements and easily ensures compliance with the brand guidelines,
• The campaign managers easily take control of the campaign and can optimize it autonomously,
• The marketing team simplifies the creation of relevant campaigns, which are optimally delivered to all recipients.

Click on the images to view the full emails

A simple tool to master…

Another strong point of Dartagnan is its ease of use. Lolita Saint-Maxent has observed this on several occasions… particularly since a certain March 2020, with its string of lockdowns and teams discovering the joys of remote work.

Distributing campaigns to design, ensuring information flows smoothly, integrating new team members: a potential headache in this context? Not really… at least not for the email part, thanks to Dartagnan, which allows new hires to become quickly operational.

“As the tool is very intuitive, it takes little time to get up to speed,” emphasizes Lolita Saint-Maxent. “Even someone who has never used it will quickly realize what they can achieve. The result: since they quickly find their bearings in the design tool, team members ‘dare’ more.” This was the case for a new campaign manager who joined the team during the lockdown and remote work period, and all were “operational on Dartagnan within two weeks, whereas it took much longer with other tools in our marketing stack,” observes Lolita Saint-Maxent.

… and which streamlines collaboration

Having an ergonomic email builder also simplifies collaboration, notes the marketing director. “Even connecting to Dartagnan for just 15 minutes allows us to make progress and ‘get something out. “It might not seem like much, but in days that are often fragmented like we experience in the department, it’s a big win.”

This collaboration is all the more effective because all members of the marketing team (not just those dedicated to CRM) know how to use Dartagnan.

This decision originated from the renewal of the CRM team: in May 2019, the entire team left Motoblouz. While rebuilding the team over six months, the marketing department had to distribute the tasks. Most were novices, both in email marketing in general and in using Dartagnan.

A disaster? More like an opportunity! Lolita Saint-Maxent took this chance (as planned in Dartagnan’s onboarding) to train her teams. All of them, including the marketing director: traffic manager, artistic director, and the new CRM manager who joined later.

“These trainings had two benefits,” says Lolita. “First, they allowed us to include more people in the campaign creation process, particularly creative profiles who now enjoy coming up with strong messaging for this channel – even though some openly declared they hated it! Secondly, they gave us 10,000 ideas… which we implemented!“

No more barriers to creativity!

Ultimately, the number one benefit of adopting Dartagnan is this: by simplifying campaign design, streamlining each person’s work, and training and upskilling more employees on email, Motoblouz has given a significant boost to the creativity of its campaigns.

This is important for Motoblouz, a highly specialized player in its market that has invested heavily in its brand image and associated quality of service. For the teams, this positioning must be perfectly reflected across all communication channels, including email.

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“With our artistic director in particular, who trained on Dartagnan, we found our ‘touch’ in email, with a distinctive graphic style and tone,” appreciates Lolita Saint-Maxent. “The team has been able to test a wide range of layouts and graphic ideas, click zone by click zone: we’ve been working with Dartagnan for a few years now, and I’m still regularly surprised by what we can do with it!“

More creative and more efficient, Motoblouz’s marketing teams have mastered email inside out… and don’t plan to stop there! Integrating co-created videos with their customers as part of an ambassador program, optimizing transactional emails, accelerating segmentation of sends… Thanks to the time saved with Dartagnan, Motoblouz is brimming with projects for its email and CRM program!