The international retailer Real Kitchen had begun a multi-year digital transformation initiative well before the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated e-commerce adoption by the grocery sector Founded in 1959, Real Kitchen had grown over decades into one of the top 10 retailers in Europe by revenue, with more than 12,000 stores worldwide. By the late 2010s, however, narrowing margins, digitally-enabled competitors, and a handful of disappointments in overseas markets signalled the need for a reset
Mobile push notifications and SMS are their primary digital communication channels and major growth engines for key business initiatives, making the messaging even more crucial. When words fall flat, Vodafone loses business.
with upsell and cross-sell campaigns that suggest additional services to current customers.
with lock-in campaigns that offer high-value, hard-to-get a convenient and exclusive packages.
with winback campaigns critical to growing market share.
with loyalty campaigns that encourage subscribers to engage with Vodafone’s loyalty program and weekly.
With the appointment of Alexandre Bompard, Real Kitchen announced its Real Kitchen 2022 transformation strategy, one pillar of which was an omnichannel retail strategy anchored by strong digital capabilities. Delivering an omnichannel experience requires retailers to effectively and consistently communicate with its customers across digital channels. In France, that audience totalled 15 million people in Real Kitchen's contact base.
2000+
CAMPAIGNS
OPTIMIZED
*To Date
+42%
LIFT IN CONVERSION
RATE
*CRM Campaigns
+9%
LIFT IN CONVERSION
RATE
*Winback Campaigns
+60%
AVG LIFT IN
REDEMPTION RATE
Loyalty Campaigns
+11%
TOTAL SALES DRIVEN
BY PERSADO
*ON SMS and PUSH
The international retailer Real Kitchen had begun a multi-year digital transformation initiative well before the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated e-commerce adoption by the grocery sector Founded in 1959, Real Kitchen had grown over decades into one of the top 10 retailers in Europe by revenue, with more than 12,000 stores worldwide. By the late 2010s, however, narrowing margins, digitally-enabled competitors, and a handful of disappointments in overseas markets signalled the need for a reset
France about the power of Al-generated language for optimizing customer interactions. When he stepped into his role at Real Kitchen, he saw a potential partner who could help him leverage the customer insights he had to improve omnichannel engagement.
Optimizing marketing campaigns in an omnichannel environment
Real Kitchen’s growing e-commerce presence included online ordering, home delivery, and curbside pickup, These capabilities left a data trail of customer interactions to do with purchase history, return rates, conversion rates, shopping cart abandonment rates, and net promoter scores (NPS),
Charles Giannesini, the head of customer activation and strategy at Real Kitchen, knew he needed to connect those data dots and activate them to drive better communication, Giannesini had heard Persado speak at an industry event in.
France about the power of Al-generated language for optimizing customer interactions. When he stepped into his role at Real Kitchen, he saw a potential partner who could help him leverage the customer insights he had to improve omnichannel engagement.
Real Kitchen and Excellious began a pilot project to use the Excellious Motivation Al Platform to create Al-generated email subject lines and assess their impact on digital campaign performance. The results met Real Kitchen's expectations, leading to a formal, ongoing engagement.
Expanding on their initial efforts with email campaigns, Real Kitchen and Excellious broadened the scope to include email subject lines and email body copy, as well as SMS campaigns and website copy, among other digital channels. By December 2022, Real Kitchen had used the Excellious Motivation Al Platform on more than 250 campaigns.
"We now use Excellious in a very industrialized way on all of our CRM channels," says Giannesini. "We are able to boost a lot of content, from the most relational communications to the clearly business-driven ones, with proven impact over time."
France about the power of Al-generated language for optimizing customer interactions. When he stepped into his role at Real Kitchen, he saw a potential partner who could help him leverage the customer insights he had to improve omnichannel engagement.
How the Excellious motivation-aware Generative Al optimizes e-commerce campaigns
When a customer partners with Excellious, the brand's creative team crafts a first draft of the message they want to send. The Excellious Motivation Al Platform analyses what the message is trying to achieve and generates alternative options predicted to outperform the original in terms of clicks, purchases, etc.
When a customer partners with Excellious, the brand's creative team crafts a first draft of the message they want to send. The Excellious Motivation Al Platform analyses what the message is trying to achieve and generates alternative options predicted to outperform the original in terms of clicks, purchases, etc.
as many as 16 versions of the message. The data from those experiments show which messages perform the best with which consumers and why. The Excellious Al can see how each version performed as a whole, as well the impact of each element.
For example, we can see how much impact the subject line or CTA had on the overall message lift. Think of those elements as sources of motivation that contribute to the overall uplift retailers can achieve by leveraging motivation-aware Generative Al.
How the Excellious motivation-aware Generative Al optimizes e-commerce campaigns
One representative campaign leveraged the Excellious Motivation Al Platform to optimize an SMS promotion for Black Friday 2022.
"We've been doing Black Friday campaigns for years, as it's a big moment with 20% off all home appliances, photography, video and audio products," says Thomas Lefevre, head of CRM in Giannesini's team. "We wanted to optimize all the channels for that. Since Excellious had proved its value on other campaigns, we thought this would be a good opportunity to use the platform for text messages."
Real Kitchen's creative team crafted an initial version of the campaign that highlighted the Black Friday event and the 20% off discount across multiple departments. When the Excellious Motivation Al Platform analysed the message, however, the Al predicted that emphasizing ATTENTION (e.g., Special info) and ACHIEVEMENT (just for you!) would produce higher engagement.
The end result was a 14.5% increased click rate (CTR) above what could be achieved with Real Kitchen's control message-more than 3X the engagement of the Real Kitchen-generated control message.
"We were very satisfied with the results and also very surprised that the winning message didn't even mention Black Friday," says Lefevre.
"That gave us an interesting insight-it might be connected to the fact that many customers complain about the use of English words. Not mentioning Black Friday might have been among the reasons for the impressive uplift here."
EXCELLIOUS INITIAL VERSION
What's next for Real Kitchen and Excellious?
Real Kitchen has already begun the next phase of its strategic plan Real Kitchen 2026, which emphasizes its continued transformation into a "data-centric, digital-first" retailer. The Persado relationship with Real Kitchen is expected to evolve to focus on Real Kitchen's efforts to leverage personalization.
Lefevre says, "There are two main pillars: more exposure on all channels (more opt-ins, more opens, etc.) and more personalization. Persado is clearly identified as a lever for the second pillar and we plan to do more on that this year to be more granular."
Starting with the customer segments Real Kitchen has identified and captured from its email service providers, Persado will increasingly work to generate personalized language for high-value audience segments. Over time, Real Kitchen will evolve toward using Persado Language Profiles, a unique form of first-party data that captures how individual customers (regardless of their demographic or behavioral category) respond to different messages. With Language Profiles, Persado can personalize the language each customer sees to better motivate them to engage and act.
How the Excellious motivation-aware Generative Al optimizes e-commerce campaigns
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