Nestor Accelerates Growth by Increasing Customer Loyalty via Marketing Automation

Customer experience as the cornerstone of their marketing strategy

Nestor is a French startup that cooks and delivers lunches to offices and homes. For the past five years, they’ve been offering a unique experience for customers’ taste buds, inspired by chefs all over the world.

In a very competitive industry, the brand sets itself apart with its unique concept of a single daily menu, delivered with a hot main, and prepared exclusively with fresh seasonal produce. This model is a real business choice, that allows Nestor to maintain attractive prices and avoid waste.

For Ludivine Gloria, CMO, customer experience is the cornerstone of her marketing strategy, focused on retention and reactivation. She’s chosen Brevo to fine tune and automate the customer journey, improve customer satisfaction, and increase order frequency. 

Building customer loyalty to increase order frequency

When Ludivine joined Nestor in October 2019, she started on her first challenge: replacing the existing email marketing platform to comply with GDPR. She thus worked with the CTO to find a tool that would host their servers in the EU. 

Soon enough, Brevo stood out from its competitors, not just on the GDPR compliance aspect, but also in the flexibility of the service offering. “We were looking for an agile solution, that is in constant evolution to prepare for the future. The plan matched our needs and our budget,” Ludivine explains. 

Every weekday morning, the teams send out the menu of the day to their customers to drive orders, and every Sunday, the menu of the upcoming week. These communications account for around 20% of the turnover, so the CMO needed a robust and reliable tool to send them, allowing them to segment their base according to the marketing preferences of the customers. 

Ludivine was particularly convinced by how user-friendly the platform is, the assurance of better email deliverability, and the ability to integrate Brevo to the company’s website to pull order data. Indeed, an important part of Nestor’s marketing strategy lies in building customer loyalty, so it was crucial that their platform would be able to easily execute automated workflows, especially where reordering was concerned. 

Marketing automation at the heart of the loyalty strategy

Faced with the urgency of GDPR compliance, Nestor’s team switched to Brevo very quickly, supported by their dedicated Customer Success Manager as part of their Enterprise plan. Following the IP warm up process, essential to ensure excellent email deliverability, Ludivine incorporates each feature one by one. “It was a step by step situation. We started with email integration, then we moved on to customer data to personalise campaigns. We finished by tackling automation,” she details.

Along with daily emails to present the single menu, automation is at the heart of the marketing team’s loyalty strategy. The first scenario they implemented aimed at evaluating the Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction. “Every Thursday, the scenario is programmed to automatically trigger an email to customers who have placed an order in the previous seven days. It’s just so practical!” reports the CMO.

The marketing team works hand in hand with IT, who has entirely developed the commercial website internally. “At Nestor, everything is made in-house, including the website!” highlights Ludivine. Order information data has been integrated with Brevo, allowing her to build “a simple and quick loyalty program, based on a coupon technology, that works very well,” and leverages the benefits of marketing automation. 

To drive customers to repeat their orders, the Nestor team chases them regularly, especially when they’ve placed less than three orders. “We’ve noticed that once the third order has been placed, customers tend to come back more often,” explains Ludivine. Yet again, automation has proved to be very effective in this case as it allows her to use the date of the last order as an entry point to the scenario. “It’s magical, I no longer have to go through IT to do the typical large data extracts so in terms of preparation, there’s nothing to do,” she concludes. 

An entire team saving time and gaining autonomy with Brevo

A year after the beginning of her journey with Brevo, Ludivine observes that she has saved a lot of time and effort on a daily basis, and has gained autonomy. “All our data is now on Brevo, we can manage all the transactional emails, they all have the same format, and IT is really pleased that they only have to deal with a single supplier,” she sums up. 

Amongst the many benefits that have made a difference, Ludivine really appreciated the ability to easily create new email templates using the drag & drop editor when overhauling the Nestor brand in November 2020. For her, being able to talk to a partner that speaks her language and operates in her time zone is also a big advantage. She also highlights the efficiency of the Send at Best Time feature, which automatically calculates the best time to serve emails to each customer, thus increasing the performance of her Sunday email. 

In terms of results, the NPS campaign performs very well. “If there’s a low score, we’ve set up an automated second chance email and we can see that we’re saving some lost clients with it,” specifies Ludivine. Besides, the CMO is really happy with the efficiency of her loyalty program, even though it only launched a few months ago. “We’ve already observed that more customers are placing a third order,” she says. 

For Nestor, the next steps with Brevo include finalising the rebranding of their transactional emails and adding more personalisation to their chaser emails. “We bought a range of possibilities, we know we can still go further!” concludes Ludivine.