Kaunet gets personal with customers using Oracle

Kaunet, established in 2000, is the online sales subsidiary of Japan’s Kokuyo Worldwide, a maker of stationery, furniture, and other office supplies. Kaunet also sells computer peripherals, office automation systems, appliances, even beverages. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, its sales of telework-related products such as PC and smartphone stands soared, as did sales of hygiene-related products such as masks and disinfectants. Kaunet now sells more than 500,000 different items in all.

In 2018 Kaunet started offering services to consumers in addition to businesses, but it had no ability to send personalized emails to target individuals with unique needs.

Kaunet chose Oracle Responsys, part of the Oracle CX suite of customer experience applications. Oracle Responsys enables Kaunet marketers to target individuals based on their purchase histories, activity on the company website, and other factors so that they can tailor the right message to the right people at the right time.

“Finally, the decisive factor for our implementation was that it was the perfect tool for our goal of sending personalized messages to our segmented customers,” says Kaunet marketing specialist Kouichi Watanabe. “In particular, Oracle Responsys was highly evaluated for its ability to make detailed settings for message creation and customer data combination and generation,” Watanabe says, as well as for how easy it was to learn and use.

Cost was also an important consideration. “Responsys was the best in this respect as well,” he says, as was security.

Kaunet is also using the cloud-based Oracle Maxymiser Testing and Optimization to optimize the display of its websites through A/B testing. And by linking Oracle Maxymiser to Oracle Responsys Campaign Management, the company is personalizing its website in coordination with its customer marketing campaigns.

Kaunet is still evaluating the results of its newly activated marketing initiatives, but it thinks its Oracle-powered personalized marketing efforts could bring in 15% to 20% more business with some customers, while its email open rates could increase by 10 to 20 percentage points. “Providing valuable information to customers builds good relationships and will be reflected in the numbers,” Watanabe says.

With the marketing applications Kaunet used previously, business unit marketers would spend a lot of hours building and sending one-size-fits-all emails. With Oracle Responsys Campaign Management, “I was deeply moved when I could actually send tens of thousands of personalized emails to tens of thousands of customers,” Watanabe says.  “Moreover, it is a big attraction that we can do it without asking the IT department.”

Now Kaunet’s marketers are delivering emails according to the behavior of individual customers. For example, they will send coupons to customers who haven’t made a purchase for a specific time period; they will follow up with customers who abandoned their online shopping carts; or they will inform customers, based on their purchase histories, of the benefits of buying in bulk.

Kaunet CMO Takeshi Fujimura cites two other benefits of the Oracle CX implementation: lower costs and faster execution. Business units previously relied on the company’s IT organization to extract customer lists and other data. It was a time-consuming and labor-intensive process. Now Kaunet uses real-time behavioral data, available in Oracle Responsys Campaign Management, to target and personalize experiences.