McArthurGlen Achieves 5x Campaign Throughput

Organization

McArthurGlen

Industry

Designer Outlet Retail

Services Used

Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Lifecycle Marketing, Marketing Automation, Email Design and Development, CRM Operations

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About

McArthurGlen is Europe's leading designer outlet retailer, operating 23 centers across Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UK, and welcoming more than 90 million visitors a year across 3,000+ brand stores.

That scale demanded a CRM program built to match it. Instead, the brand was still running manual, batch-driven campaigns that could not keep pace with a business operating across eight countries and dozens of outlets.

Challenges

  • A lean internal team struggled to scale campaign execution across multiple outlets and regions
  • A brittle Excel-to-CSV-to-FTP workflow made campaign builds slow, error-prone, and rigid
  • Communications were batch-driven, with no automation around lifecycle moments like birthdays or post-visit touchpoints
  • Open rates, click rates, and click-to-open rates were trailing luxury retail benchmarks
  • Static campaigns could not deliver the dynamic, regional content the brand needed at scale

Goals

  • Scale campaign output without scaling the internal team's headcount at the same rate
  • Replace manual batch sends with always-on, automated lifecycle journeys
  • Lift engagement benchmarks across opens, clicks, and click-to-open rate
  • Give regional teams a way to run dynamic, localized campaigns independently
  • Build a repeatable CRM operating model that could scale across all eight countries

Solution/Approach

  • Built always-on lifecycle journeys in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, covering onboarding, birthdays, post-visit follow-up, points expiry, Privilege Club statements, refer-a-friend, and preference surveys
  • Powered every journey with dynamic modular content blocks and regional segmentation, so the same framework could flex per market
  • Designed modular, brand-consistent email templates that protected the McArthurGlen identity while speeding up production
  • Replaced the Excel-to-CSV-to-FTP handoff with Cloud Page-driven briefing, letting regional managers self-serve campaigns with real-time desktop and mobile previews
  • Scaled the campaign team from 2 to 9 managers, running up to 10 campaigns a day across 28 outlets
  • Introduced quarterly planning frameworks with strict SLAs across briefing, approvals, QA, and scheduling, supporting everything from single sends to 36-plus email journeys

Results

  • 5x campaign throughput - Scaled from roughly 300 manual campaigns a year to 1,500+ always-on campaigns across 28 outlets
  • 50% higher click rate - Lifted engagement well above the brand's previous luxury retail benchmark
  • 30% higher open rate - Always-on, personalized journeys outperformed the old batch-driven sends
  • 35% higher click-to-open rate - Confirmed the content itself, not just better timing, was resonating harder
  • 9-person campaign team - Grew from 2 managers to 9, running up to 10 campaigns a day
  • 28 outlets live - Every outlet across McArthurGlen's European and Canadian footprint now runs on always-on lifecycle journeys

The bigger win: McArthurGlen replaced a manual, single-team bottleneck with a scalable CRM operating model, one built to keep adding markets, journeys, and personalization without adding headcount at the same rate.

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