Challenges:
- Initial team limited to just 5 salespeople, with highly manual processes.
- Overworked consultants, with no time to provide high-quality services.
- Unsatisfactory repurchase rate, leading to lost recurring revenue opportunities.
- Lack of robust metrics to monitor and improve performance in digital channels.
Solutions:
- Expansion of the team of consultants to 32 salespeople, allowing greater reach and personalization of service.
- Process automation through strategic integrations with Oracle, Octadesk and ActiveCampaign's advanced tools with the support and expertise of El Funileiro, ActiveCampaign's partner agency.
- Also with the collaboration of the partner agency, abandoned cart automation was implemented, contributing to an 8% to 10% increase in the company's total turnover.
- Detailed monitoring of key metrics, such as the number of contacts made, the return rate, the conversion rate, the percentage of customers who show interest and the share of online sales in overall turnover.
Main Challenges
- Low Repurchase Rate
- A base with millions of leads, yet with 10% not having made a purchase for more than 90 days. This represented a significant financial loss.
- Lack of Automation and Optimization in Sales Processes
- Consultants made only a few contacts a day, facing difficulties in managing the large number of leads and personalizing the calls.
- Need for Data Centralization and Integration
- Customer data scattered between different systems (E-commerce, Octadesk, ERP), making it difficult to organize and analyze for sales and repurchase strategies.
- Limited Conversion Rate in E-commerce
- Organic sales conversion (without human interaction) was insufficient to sustain the desired growth.
- Lack of tools for measuring results
- The need for detailed insights into return and conversion rates at each stage of the sales funnel in order to optimize strategies.
Implemented Solutions
- Reconquista Project
- Creating personalized automations to encourage repurchases, focusing on hundreds of thousands of inactive leads.
- Adoption of a nurturing and follow-up flow to engage customers who did not make purchases after the initial interaction.
- Automation and Scalability with ActiveCampaign
- Implementation of efficient automation for abandoned carts, generating more than 2.5 million reais per year.
- Consultants now make five times more contacts a day, prioritizing quality service thanks to ActiveCampaign's automations.
- Integrations with essential systems
- Integration of E-commerce (Oracle) and the customer service tool (Octadesk) with ActiveCampaign.
- Automatic generation of tickets and deals in the CRM with movement between stages based on predefined criteria.
- Advanced Lead Segmentation and Management in CRM
- Organizing leads into different stages of the sales funnel (e.g. product in cart, pending payment).
- Planning personalized campaigns based on customer behavior and preferences.
- Measuring Results with Centralized Data
- Detailed monitoring of the return rate and specific conversion rates for each stage of the funnel.
- Increase in conversion rate with human interaction to three times the organic average.
- Structured Expansion Plans
- Clear targets for increasing the Inside Sales team.
- The project aims to reach more than 100,000 customers by 2027 with loyalty and personalization strategies.
- Partner
- Continue the partnership with El Funileiro, as it already establishes a fluid and efficient collaboration. The agency has in-depth knowledge of the company's operations and needs, as well as being a specialist in the ActiveCampaign platform, which guarantees the continued success of automations and processes.
With ActiveCampaign, we saw an 8% to 10% increase in total company revenue.
How things were before AC
Carmen Steffens was founded in 1993 in Franca, São Paulo, with the aim of bringing quality leather to Brazil. An opportunity was then seen to create products that combined sophistication, comfort and trends with a touch of personality. Initially, the brand focused on footwear and soon expanded to bags, belts and other accessories, always maintaining the standard of high quality and unique style. The first franchise opened in 1995.
Today, 65% of the raw material is produced by them, as well as 99.9% of the products, this way they are able to follow the whole production chain process.
Carmen Steffens has 560 stores in 20 countries. In 2025, they will open an online store and a physical location in Dubai. One of the objectives is to take the Brazilian flag, showing quality products, to different parts of the world.
According to Thales Mendes, Head of Inside Sales at Carmen Steffens, the brand's focus has always been on delivering an experience far above average because, when it comes to shoes, even if they are of very high quality, without offering a distinctive experience, they become a commodity—you can buy them anywhere. The idea is to deliver an excellent experience both in the physical stores, with a service far above the market average, and in Ecommerce, where Carmen has a team of consultants who are extremely well prepared to serve customers who come online.
Thales has always believed strongly in the potential of ecommerce, so in 2022 he and his team started a major digital project—they did extensive market research, mainly into CRM tools and marketing automation to find the best tool to give the sales team security. They talked to companies like Pipedrive, Hubspot, Salesforce and decided to close with ActiveCampaign and El Funileiro , ActiveCampaign's partner agency.
And why did they choose ActiveCampaign?
After extensive market research, they realized that ActiveCampaign offered the best cost-benefit ratio. It is much more than just an email marketing tool—it provides advanced technology, customer relationship management (CRM), clear data insights, and numerous integration and automation possibilities that met their needs. Additionally, they partnered with El Funileiro, a company with deep expertise in both ActiveCampaign's technology and marketing and sales strategies. This partnership provided valuable insights into sales processes linked to the CRM, which was exactly what they needed at that moment.
What Was Carmen Steffens’ Main Challenge When They Started with ActiveCampaign?
It was repeat purchases! When they began using ActiveCampaign, they already had a vast database with millions of leads who had purchased from Carmen Steffens over the years. And the main objective was to retain some of these women. Make them return to physical stores and/or e-commerce and buy Carmen Steffens products again.
The team did a study at the time and realized that hundreds of thousands of women hadn't shopped for more than 90 days. They did a calculation using the average ticket and noticed that this represented a very high financial volume.
They saw a great opportunity! Use ActiveCampaign to trigger repeat purchases from these women.
Getting hands-on
They then started a project, which they called Reconquista Project, with the entire sales channel and E-commerce.
In partnership with the agency El Funileiro, an ActiveCampaign ally, several stages of the customer journey were structured using automation and CRM. In addition, integration with Oracle (E-commerce) was carried out and automations were activated to create tasks for salespeople, ensuring that all e-commerce customers received the appropriate follow-ups.
Also with the support of the partner agency, highly efficient automations were developed for recovering abandoned carts in ActiveCampaign, which directly contributed to an 8% to 10% increase in the company's total revenue.
Other automations implemented provided significant time savings at scale. Considering that salespeople generally need to focus on volume, ActiveCampaign's automations have allowed consultants to stop spending time on repetitive processes and direct their attention to the quality of service. As a result, the conversion rate increased significantly.
The Inside Sales team has grown from 4 before ActiveCampaign to 32 salespeople who use the CRM daily to optimize their operations and boost results.
Important integration and automations to achieve these results
In addition to the integration with e-commerce, Carmen Steffens uses another essential integration: with Octadesk , the customer service tool used by the team. With the support of the El Funileiro agency, several automations were developed in ActiveCampaign linked to this integration. Whenever a customer contacts us via e-commerce, a ticket is automatically generated and the contact is entered into an automation that creates a deal in ActiveCampaign's own CRM and moves it between stages automatically, according to pre-defined criteria.
With ActiveCampaign, the team began to organize leads efficiently within the CRM, segmenting them by stages in the sales funnel: contact initiated, contact returned, product in cart, pending payment and payment made.
Depending on the result of the interaction, different automations come into action: if the customer does not make the purchase, a personalized nurturing automation is ready to be activated, maintaining engagement and increasing the chances of future conversion.
Measuring Results
When they started using ActiveCampaign, each salesperson made an average of 15 to 20 contacts a day. Today, with the support of automations, they can make up to 80 daily contacts, maintaining an even higher quality of service.
Compared to the average conversion rate for organic e-commerce (without paid media and without human interaction), the rate with human interaction is 5 times higher. The combination of human interaction and structured process management in ActiveCampaign resulted in a conversion rate three times higher.
In addition, they began to monitor the average return rate at each stage of the funnel, ensuring a complete overview of performance.
With this well-defined structure, the sales made by the team of consultants through ActiveCampaign already represent 45% of the company's total sales.
According to Thales, this measurement capability is only possible thanks to ActiveCampaign. Managing an ecosystem that interacts with thousands of women a month, with the goal of reaching hundreds of thousands by 2025, requires a robust tool like ActiveCampaign to centralize data and monitor all conversion rates.
And what are the next steps?
Carmen Steffens' team has big goals for the coming years. By the end of 2027, they hope to expand the Inside Sales team to 208 salespeople, with a projection of generating hundreds of millions of reais in annual revenue through this project alone.
The focus will remain on repeat purchases, with strategies to reach customers who, for some reason, have stopped buying. The goal is to win back as many of these women as possible, offering extremely personalized service provided by highly qualified consultants. Customer loyalty remains an absolute priority.
In addition to B2C, Carmen Steffens is also investing in major B2B projects, including the expansion of franchises and the opening of new multi-brand stores. Within this robust ecosystem, the group expects to reach 100,000 customers, in both B2B and B2C, by the end of 2027.
Another strategic step is integration with the ERP, making it possible to centralize all customer data in ActiveCampaign, regardless of whether they are from the physical or digital channel. They currently use ONCLIK ERP, and the main aim of this integration is to deepen their knowledge of their personas. For each customer, they want to map out detailed information, such as social circle, preference for plain or printed garments, and the types of products they are most interested in. This approach seeks to offer a personalized experience for all customers, further enhancing the relationship and building loyalty.
