Reactivating the Coffee Connection: Nespresso’s Approach to Customer Retention

Tristan Kohler

05-26-2025

Nespresso was founded over 30 years ago on a simple yet powerful idea: everyone should be able to enjoy a perfect cup of espresso at home. Since then, the brand has redefined how millions of people savor their coffee and has played a key role in shaping the global coffee culture.

Its success is evident: for many years, Nespresso has ranked among the most beloved brands among Swiss consumers. But the coffee market is intensely competitive—both in Switzerland and globally. To maintain its edge, Nespresso is investing in customer data solutions to enhance communication through consistently personalized outreach within clearly defined audience segments.

Reactivating Customers with Data-Driven Personalization

To bring back inactive customers, Nespresso launched a multi-phase marketing campaign built around personalized offers tailored to the duration of each customer’s inactivity. The company deployed a combination of email and various media channels for this initiative, with Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) playing a central role.

Using AEP, Nespresso was able to build precise audience segments, which in turn formed the foundation of a multi-channel strategy to reengage lapsed customers. The brand connected its digital audiences to its proprietary Customer Data Platform (CDP) to ensure a consistent and seamless customer journey across all digital touchpoints and communication channels. A strict adherence to local data privacy and consent regulations was also a key requirement throughout the process.

The result: the campaign delivered single-digit percentage growth in reactivated customers year-over-year, with a significant share of reactivations directly attributed to the targeted media campaigns. This new “always-on” program enables Nespresso to continuously refine its targeting strategies by closely monitoring performance metrics.

For Nespresso, Adobe Experience Platform represents a major shift. It allows the brand to automate audience targeting based on offer eligibility—even in complex scenarios—and enables a smooth transition from manually defined campaign rules and eligibility logic to dynamic, highly personalized campaigns driven by automated goals.

Laying the Groundwork for Sustainable Growth

The campaign’s success highlights the strategic importance of sophisticated processes like multi-channel targeting and activation. Without an automation solution, executing such highly personalized campaigns would be nearly impossible for marketing teams due to the operational complexity and effort involved.

With Adobe, Nespresso has found a way to consolidate customer data from multiple sources—including legacy ERP systems—into a single orchestration platform, enabling coherent and coordinated marketing execution. The flexibility of the solution also helped address opt-in compliance across communication channels and allowed Nespresso to dynamically shift its efforts to the channels that proved most effective in reaching its audience.

Looking ahead, Nespresso plans to further refine its targeting strategies using Adobe Experience Platform, with the aim of optimizing all always-on marketing campaigns, improving performance, and meeting the specific needs of its customer base.

With more than 10 years of experience, Tristan Kohler, Digital Commerce Manager at Nespresso Switzerland, has managed international and local online sales, specializing in digital marketing. His expertise spans the full digital commerce spectrum, focusing on sales and optimizing the customer journey. He has worked on transforming the business models using MarTech solutions for continuous CRM activation and personalization. Through co-branding and digital innovation, he has expanded reach to new audiences. His background in digital and IT solutions enabled him to deliver innovative omni-channel solutions for Nespresso retail, enhancing customer service with a phygital approach.