Barbeques Galore serves up personalised customer experiences with Salesforce

The backyard barbeque is a well-loved Australian tradition and one that Barbeques Galore has helped fuel since 1977. Today, Barbeques Galore leads the market in barbeque retailing with over 90 stores across the country and a growing community of loyal customers known as the Barbeques Legends Club. 

The retailer is also transforming with Salesforce to deliver a seamless and personalised omni-channel experience—one that will allow it to connect with customers throughout their journey.

“It’s not just a product we’re selling, but the treasured moments it creates for those who use it, and we want to be by the customer's side throughout,” said Mike Ainsworth, General Manager of Marketing and Customer at Barbeques Galore. “Our partnership with Salesforce makes that possible and more.”

Working towards this vision, Barbeques Galore has already doubled online sales and has all the ingredients in place to cook up personalised customer experiences.

A barbeque is not an everyday purchase, so to stay close with customers, Barbeques Galore realised it had to make the most of its digital touchpoints. The retailer kicked off a digital transformation and chose Salesforce as its platform for customer engagement. 

The platform—including Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud—was rolled out in six months with support from Salesforce partners Amblique and Merkle.

Commerce Cloud has transformed the online shopping experience through the delivery of engaging content, improved search, real-time inventory status, and personalised recommendations provided by Einstein Product Recommendations. So customers can visit the website for inspiration, quickly find what they want, and see which store has it in stock. Choosing ‘click and collect’, their item will be ready in 30 minutes.

“Comparing the experience of our previous site to what we have now is like comparing night and day. Our site is fast, scalable, responsive, and conversion has increased massively,” said Ainsworth. “Our online sales have also doubled since moving to Commerce Cloud, and we’ve yet to take advantage of all it has to offer.”

In the past, Barbeques Galore’s efforts to get closer to customers were hindered by fragmented customer support. Different teams managed inquiries from different channels and they lacked a shared view of cases. If a customer called about an issue they raised through social media, the agent who picked up the phone had no history or insight into why they were calling. 

With Service Cloud, Barbeques Galore can provide a more connected service. All customer interactions and case details are held in a central space and visible to those who need access, including the contact centre, the social media team, and store employees.

Barbeques Galore’s ultimate goal is to create a consistent and loyal experience with all its customers, at every stage of the customer journey; not just post-purchase. This is a  significant difference in approach from many other retailers. Fueling this is the retailer’s desire to continue connecting the online, in-store, and post-purchase experiences as it continues to support customers as they use and enjoy the products they’ve purchased. Central to this is Marketing Cloud, which has replaced a stand-alone email marketing solution to enable the delivery of hyper-relevant content and offers via email and digital advertising channels.

“What Salesforce allows us to do is understand a customer’s affinity with a particular product or category and their propensity to buy, and that will inform the way we communicate in the future,” said Ainsworth. “For example, if someone is interested in a BBQ smoker, but their propensity to purchase is low, we can keep them engaged with recipes. If their propensity is high, we can send them tailored offers to entice them further and increase their motivation to buy.”

The future use of Personalisation from Marketing Cloud will orchestrate these experiences. In addition, Barbeques Galore is centralising all customer and transaction data onto the Customer 360 platform to power smarter personalisation streams, customer support, and activations. MuleSoft has helped facilitate this by enabling integration between Salesforce and other internal systems. 

Since launching the Barbeques Legend Club, Barbeques Galore has also doubled its conversation rate of in-store sign-ups, growing its first-party data and supporting a strategic shift to further utilise its owned media channels. This will reduce an over-reliance on paid media channels while also allowing deeper engagement with customers. 

The unique approach to loyalty has seen the national retailer shift away from the typical spend and save loyalty program. Instead, the Barbeques Legend Club is designed to build loyalty at every step of the customer journey, as the retailer celebrates with customers barbeque tongs in hand and offers rich and unique experiences, cooking classes, demos and lessons, and access to a rich and engaged BBQ community. 

Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud support the program and Barbeques Galore’s communication and engagement strategy by enabling more frequent and relevant engagement.

“What we’re focused on is building warm relationships with our customers and helping them barbeque better. There’s no way we could do that without a platform like Salesforce that makes it easy to understand and connect with them,” said Ainsworth.