Whether you’re an expert in construction, an enthusiastic DIY-er, or the occasional user of a tape measure, you’ve heard of Stanley Black & Decker. The world leader in tools and outdoor equipment employs over 60,000 people and serves as a household name in 60 countries, providing jobsite and household essentials since 1843.

As a B2B2C company, Stanley Black & Decker’s core business is to generate demand for its distributors and retailers, such as Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Amazon, by acquiring and activating its end-user data.

This mission to better understand their customers is a challenging one: a tiny but mighty two-person team is responsible for managing over ten automated customer journeys across eight markets and four total brands, including DEWALT, BLACK+DECKER, IRWIN, and STANLEY TOOLS.

How does this team do it all for a global enterprise with such limited resources? Ana Mourão, the senior manager of Stanley Black & Decker’s global customer journey and CRM, explains that automation came to the rescue, specifically with the adoption of Iterable’s Catalog.

At Iterable’s Activate conference, Ana explained how Stanley Black & Decker overcame its customer journey challenges in three steps: ensuring you have the right data, building a catalog with Iterable, and deploying a dynamic email template.

Step 1: Ensure You Have the Right Data

Most enterprises as massive as Stanley Black & Decker are already sitting atop a mountain of data, but how do they ensure they have the right data? In this step, it’s crucial to define which data would benefit the most from automation.

For Stanley Black & Decker, that meant collecting four types of data:

1. SKU data
2. Data from regional e-commerce partners
3. First-party user attributes, such as occupation or hobbies
4. First-party user behavior, such as email engagement or website visits

Collecting all this data and getting it set up for use in Iterable Catalog is a group effort. The e-commerce team is responsible for SKU and regional partner data, which is then uploaded via API by the data operations team. The brand team shares email template assets, like headers and hero images, and then the customer journey team combines that information together with the first-party user data they’ve collected in their CRM to move forward with the next step and manage the creation of the catalog itself.

Step 2: Build a Catalog With Iterable

Iterable’s Catalog feature stores all this data directly and uses it to personalize messages at enterprise scale. Catalog allows businesses like Stanley Black & Decker to match users with product recommendations based on their interests, preferences, and historical activity.

As Ana explained, their engineers love using Catalog because they can set up APIs for real-time updates, which allows marketers to send email communications across all their brands and markets without technical assistance. What starts off as a spreadsheet of SKU data from an e-commerce partner, for instance, is easily uploaded and automated with a user-friendly interface.

Step 3: Deploy a Dynamic Email Template

Once the right data has been identified and imported into Iterable Catalog, the final step is to create and deploy a dynamic message template, which can be sent via email, SMS, push, in-app notifications, and more.

With minimal coding, the customer journey team can customize countless variations of their emails with a single template that auto-populates with data from the catalog they’ve created. In the image below, not only are the SKUs personalized in this email for Stanley Black & Decker’s Spanish-speaking customers, but the imagery is too. The hero image is relevant to each individual customer’s occupation or hobby, whether they’re interested in woodworking or construction.

Moreover, because e-commerce partner data is also stored in Iterable Catalog, any SKUs that are low in stock are not displayed, avoiding any mishaps where customers are encouraged to buy items that aren’t available. This allows Stanley Black & Decker to send reliable communications that build trust with end users and increase their overall satisfaction.

Always Be Automating

By consolidating and automating their data into a single email template, the customer journey team at Stanley Black & Decker can now send individualized emails based on market, brand, and unique user activity.

No more time-wasting back-and-forth with external agencies across different countries. With 80% fewer templates, Stanley Black & Decker achieved higher email engagement and 7% more clicks to its e-commerce stores.

Now the team at Stanley Black & Decker can use the 5-10 hours saved on each template to discover more ways to automate away the busy work and make a more meaningful impact on their customers’ lives.