How Apuls Segments Visitors and Creates Highly Personalized On-Site Messages

About Apuls

Apuls is a fast-growing online retailer selling quality training equipment and training supplements at affordable prices. They first conquered the Danish market and have now taken on the Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, and German markets as well.

The idea behind Apuls is based on a passion for training and wanting to encourage busy people to exercise more at home.

With a busy lifestyle, it can be difficult to prioritize going to the gym. So Apuls’ mission is to make it as easy as possible for people to live a healthy and active lifestyle with home gym equipment.

Apuls is also working on a new product line for businesses. They’ve seen how exercising at work can help increase productivity, and want to encourage people to be more active at work.




Tørring, Denmark

Staff members


Contact Person

Casper Hesselund, Chief Marketing Officer

Watch the Full Success Story in Apuls’ Own Words

Why Apuls Chose Sleeknote

Apuls faced a problem that many online businesses face today:

They weren’t getting enough information from the people who signed up for their newsletter.

They knew that getting an email address wasn’t enough. Like most companies, they wanted to learn more about their subscribers so they could personalize their email campaigns and increase their email ROI.

Apuls also wanted to provide visitors with relevant information based on their behavior on the site, such as product recommendations, customer service messages, special deals, and so on.

They couldn’t do this with their solution at the time and started looking for a more customizable software to help solve these problems.

Once they found Sleeknote, Casper quickly saw how easy it was to create customized campaigns targeted at individual visitors.

We use Sleeknote to generate leads and give visitors a better and more personalized user experience on our site by offering relevant information at the right time. And it works!

Casper Hesselund Chief Marketing Officer

Like many marketers, Casper was afraid that implementing popup campaigns on their site would hurt the user experience. But these concerns disappeared when he saw how he could target individual visitors with just the right information at the right time—without annoying visitors.

How Apuls Generates Leads

Email marketing is an important channel for Apuls. They wanted to create highly segmented email campaigns based on their subscribers’ interests.

But to do so, they needed a tool to help them get information from subscribers that could be used to automate their email marketing.

After trying Sleeknote, Apuls found out that a multistep campaign was the perfect solution for this.

With a multistep campaign, Apuls can ask visitors about their interests upon signup so they get the information right away and don’t have to follow up with email surveys.

Here’s one of the multistep campaigns Apuls uses:

They know that a visitor who’s interested in say, running equipment, should get running-related email campaigns promoting relevant offers like running gear, supplements, etc.

Knowing the interest of their subscribers enables Apuls to automate a lot of their email marketing while keeping the content relevant to the individual subscriber.

Two Intelligent Ways of Using Exit-Intent

Apuls has also experimented a lot with Exit-Intent on their site and found two highly effective use cases.

First, Apuls uses an exit-intent campaign to engage abandoning visitors who haven’t added products to their cart. They encourage abandoning visitors to join their exclusive newsletter with new products and great offers.

Apuls wants visitors to stay on their site as long as possible but know that getting a visitor’s email address is more valuable at this point. With an email address, they can create targeted email campaigns for the user and turn them into repeat customers instead of one-time buyers.

They also use an exit-intent campaign in their cart to reduce cart abandonment. They offer a discount code to encourage users to return to their cart and finish the purchase.

The conversion rate of this campaign is 5.13%, which has contributed significantly to reducing cart abandonment.

How Apuls Helps Visitors Find the Right Products

At Apuls, there’s a great focus on providing visitors with the best possible experience. They want to give visitors the same personal guidance you would find in any physical store.

They also realize that with a large product variety, it can be difficult for visitors to find the right product based on their needs.

Apuls uses Sleeknote to help visitors find what they’re looking for with relevant product recommendations based on the product categories they browse.

For example, if a visitor looks at running machines, Apuls shows a campaign with recommendations for running machines in different price ranges so visitors can easily see which machine fits their need and budget.

The teaser:

The campaign:

After implementing segmented campaigns like this on their site, Apuls has seen a significant increase in conversion rates and sales.

Switching From DIY to Managed Solution

When Apuls first started using Sleeknote, they created and managed campaigns on their own.

When they found out that Sleeknote offers a managed solution—a bespoke done-for-you service—they quickly jumped at this opportunity.

As Casper put it:

The switch to managed solution meant that Casper and the rest of the Apuls team now have more time to work on their company mission: giving people the tools and information they need to exercise more and live a healthy active lifestyle.

We get a hell of a lot of signups on our site with Sleeknote, which is amazing!

Casper Hesselund Chief Marketing Officer

With the managed solution, Apuls can rest assured that their campaigns are constantly being optimized based on data from more than 15 billion sessions. This data also enables the managed solution team to make data-driven decisions and come up with new ideas.

To begin with, Apuls chose the Essential plan which is the most affordable plan.

In Casper’s words,

Best Performing Campaigns

Apuls has great success with their product recommendation campaigns.

One of the best performing campaigns is a campaign on their bicycle product page where they recommend three different bicycles.

Apuls knows that their visitors are at different training levels. So, with that in mind, they showcase a “beginner bike” for those who’re just getting started with cycling and have a smaller budget.

Then, they show a “medium bike” for the more experienced who are looking to take their training to a new level and invest in a bike with more features. The last bike Apuls recommends is a high-performance bike for visitors who want the best of the best.

It can be difficult for visitors to get an overview of the different bikes and decide which one is best for their needs. So by limiting the options and recommending a single bike for each level has proven to be an effective way of helping visitors make that choice.

Favorite Sleeknote Feature

The multistep and the countdown timer are two of Casper’s favorite features.

The multistep allows Apuls to get more information from new signups in a very simple and non-intrusive way.

And the countdown timer is used to create urgency in their campaigns. For example, visitors might get a free product if they buy from a specific product category within a certain time frame.


The conversion rate from visitor to subscriber has increased massively since Apuls started with Sleeknote.

Sleeknote has also helped increase the time visitors spend on the Apuls website.

We realize that there are many things that contribute to these changes but Sleeknote should definitely get a lot of credit for these results. We can see that our visitors actually take the time to read the information they see in our campaigns which makes them spend more time on the site making them more likely to buy or join our newsletter.

Casper Hesselund Chief Marketing Officer

Final Thoughts

Apuls is experiencing rapid growth and has found a way to personalize their on-site campaigns, email marketing and more to meet the visitor where they are in the customer journey.

Casper has no doubts that personalization is the future of marketing, and if you want to get your audience’s attention and stand out from competitors a simple merge tag isn’t going to cut it.

By implementing Sleeknote on their site, Apuls has been able to take their personalization to a new level which has helped them collect more relevant email addresses for their email marketing, improve the user experience on their site, and increase conversion rates.

I would definitely recommend Sleeknote to other people. And I already have. Sleeknote is an amazing tool to work with, no matter if you choose to manage it yourself or have Sleeknote do it for you.

Casper Hesselund Chief Marketing Officer

Apuls’ Campaigns

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