OREANDA-NEWS. July 31, 2015. Personalization is built into the DNA of direct marketer National Pen, which supplies 1.2 million small business customers worldwide with customized, branded products. National Pen is using Oracle solutions to serve a growing community of international customers, enabling companies of all sizes to customize consumer and business-to-business (B2B) marketing campaigns.

“Oracle solutions have been critical to the company’s rapid expansion,” said Dave Thompson, chief executive officer and president, National Pen. “Oracle Commerce and Oracle Marketing Cloud are the cornerstones of our workflow throughout the organization and have enabled us to achieve true e-commerce excellence as a business.”

National Pen first implemented the Oracle Commerce solution in 2011 to support its strategy of extending its business offering and market reach with a world-class e-commerce channel.

National Pen has grown its e-commerce business 20 percent year over year, accompanied by a strong bottom line, since launching its e-commerce business using Oracle Commerce solutions. The company has continued to upgrade its Oracle Commerce platform to help drive international growth and steadily expand its product and service offerings online.

The result is a lot of net new business. National Pen’s e-commerce customers’ average order sizes are 20 percent larger than direct mail orders and retention rates are higher. In addition, 65 percent of these online buyers are outside the company’s typical profile of direct mail customers, fostering a new customer growth rate at National Pen that the company expects will significantly increase business this year.  

“We’re a global business that acts in a very localized manner, no matter where the customer may be,” said Thompson. “We’ll create nearly 400,000 new customers this year alone.”

Oracle Commerce, used by a team of e-commerce experts at the company’s San Diego headquarters, has also improved National Pen’s speed to market. Launching a site that specifically targets accountants, for example, now takes just weeks instead of a few months.

In addition, National Pen can apply personalization and business logic to dynamically populate e-mail templates across the company’s 1.2 million-strong customer database. Using Oracle Marketing Cloud, National Pen can display different content based on whether the user is an attorney, an electrician, or a pizza restaurant.

Oracle Commerce solutions also provide National Pen with insight into the comparative effectiveness of its variable marketing spend. By increasing content relevance, National Pen is achieving a higher ROI by creating a more compelling landing page when a visitor arrives.

“National Pen started early with an Oracle Commerce platform that grew with the business and is serving them well in international markets,” said Jill Puleri, senior vice president and general manager, Oracle Retail. “Oracle continues to invest in sophisticated and user-friendly tools for localizing and personalizing the customer experience, while backing these solutions with extreme performance and scalability.”

In addition to its Oracle Commerce deployment, National Pen uses Oracle Marketing Cloud to personalize email outreach to customers and prospects. Since moving to the Oracle cloud solution, the company estimates it has more than tripled its “open rates” through automated emails, which helps increase revenues. The company also relies on Oracle E-Business Suite for its enterprise operations. 

“Oracle literally runs the entire business, including financials, inventory, manufacturing, and reporting,” said Thompson.