Success Story: Afibel

Afibel is a french brand that has marked the history of inclusive ready-to-wear fashion. Since its launch in 1954, the brand has specialised in "larger size clothing" retail. Acquired by Damartex group in 2010, Afibel is now present in 8 countries with more than 150 stores.

The elegance of its designs, which are suitable and flattering for all body types, is the "inclusive fashion" brand's focal selling point.

Afibel has witnessed the birth of e-commerce and its ascendance to success as we know it today. Indeed, the brand rose to success in its debut thanks to "catalogue-based sales", which still to this day constitute an important lever of sales for Afibel. However, e-commerce represents an increasingly important growth engine for the brand. 15% of the turnover is now generated through this channel. Offering a significant return on investment, digital is now an integral part of Afibel's marketing strategy.

Afibel's DNA is structured around the genuine belief that "each femininity is unique". The diversity and uniqueness of Afibel's customer base transcend into the personalised relationship it nurtures with each one of its customers. Thus offering them an equally unique customer experience that not only is tailored to their particular needs, takes into account their consumer behavior and preferences but is also long-lasting.

The ability to provide such experiences is the competitive advantage the company is leveraging. Especially considering the ever-evolving highly digital sphere it has to operate within. On that account, the company has launched a tremendous digitalisation project in 2019, that is immensely reshaping the company's way of doing business by generating around 15% of turnover so far.

As part of its digital acceleration, the major challenge facing Afibel is undoubtedly that of successfully personalising its various interactions with its customers.

In the digital sphere, the brand's client segment is relatively volatile, less committed, and requires better offers with an increased level of personalisation. However, this personalisation challenge is greatly amplified by the need to adopt a multi-channel marketing approach to increase the retention and commitment of its customers. To take on the challenge, Afibel ought to increase the number of touchpoints with its customers, throughout their customer lifecycle.

As a result, a successful brand marketing strategy must rely on personalised communication, diverse interactions with customers at different touchpoints, precise targeting, and an escalation logic in terms of the channels used.

The choice of Actito for Afibel is part of a global call for tenders of the Damartex group. The group was looking for a robust marketing automation tool, capable of integrating personalization bricks and executing multi-channel campaigns for each of the group's companies.

The choice of Actito for the Damartex group and for Afibel in particular was made on the basis of several arguments. In particular, the major interest that the company has for behavioral triggers in order to interact with its customers at each step of their journey based on data related to their behavior and buying habits. On the other hand, Actito offers the possibility to graft several communication channels in a scalable way, in a single platform.

The success of Afibel's campaigns is based on smart scenarios and ultra-precise targeting generated from the relational data model.

The focus on promotional messages in Afibel's communications is a strategic choice of the brand. By doing so, Afibel aims to stay present in the minds of its customers and to trigger an act of purchase.

The company successfully deploys this strategy through targeted campaigns based on Actito's multi-table relational models. As a result, Afibel manages to obtain very favorable results both on its mass campaigns and on its campaigns based on behavioral triggers:

• An outstanding unsubscribe rate (0.04%)

• Almost perfect deliverability (99.24%)

• A click-through rate between 18% and 20%

• An opening rate of more than 15% for mass campaigns and more than 50% for triggers