Leading German drugstore reduces operational workload by up to 90 percent

Germany’s retail landscape is undergoing a digital transformation, and dmTECH – the technology arm of the country’s leading drugstore, dm – is at the forefront. With a vast customer base and a growing demand for personalized experiences, dmTECH recognized the need to modernize its marketing infrastructure to deliver scalable, data-driven campaigns. To meet these goals, the company has partnered with SAS and Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, to overhaul its customer engagement strategy.

dmTech modernizes marketing stack with SAS and Snowflake

The company is now using SAS 360 Direct, a module of SAS Customer Intelligence 360 that is operated on the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.

The combination of SAS and Snowflake provides dmTECH with maximum scalability and flexibility, helping them quickly increase the number of marketing campaigns at short notice. One of the most significant benefits has been process automation, which has dramatically improved the efficiency of campaign execution. By reusing audience segments and simplifying selection criteria, dmTECH’s monthly technical effort to operate the full solution was reduced from 5–10 hours to approximately one hour. The transition also led to the development of a future-ready data model that enables more precise customer targeting for existing marketing initiatives.

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As part of its free family program, glückskind (known internationally as babybonus), dm offers parents a wide range of benefits – from pregnancy through their child’s 12th birthday. These include parenting tips, giveaways, app-based coupons, product testing opportunities, and more. One of the key challenges for dm was accurately assigning customers to the right segment based on their life stage – particularly during pregnancy. With SAS 360 Direct, segmentation is now automated: for example, a customer is automatically moved to a new group once she reaches a specific week of pregnancy.

The glückskind program has now been rolled out in most countries where dm operates. Thanks to its high scalability, launching an additional 600 campaigns overnight is no longer a problem.

“dm always aims to reach customers with individual, personalized, and relevant offers – and SAS 360 Direct is key to that,” says Marcel Veith, Data Engineer at dmTECH. “Previously, our data warehouse had limited “opening hours”. With the combination of SAS and the Snowflake database, we can run any number of campaigns around the clock – that’s a huge advantage.”

“We have designed our market leading customer engagement platform, SAS Customer Intelligence 360, from the ground up to help organizations maximize investment in existing data infrastructure, insulate marketing technology from complexity and integration issues, and create and activate audiences and complex segmentations from any source,” said Lisa Loftis, Principal Product Marketing Manager, SAS Global Customer Intelligence. “We are thrilled that dmTECH has chosen SAS to future-proof their MarTech stack and lay the groundwork for scalable, automated, and personalized customer communications.”

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