How Vårdväskan Uses Mailchimp’s Personalization Tools to Achieve a High ROI

Healthcare workers in Sweden used to be resigned to a life of bland scrubs, socks, and tools—all gray everything.

Now, thanks to Vårdväskan, their days have gotten more colorful. The company founders, a police cadet and a nursing student, noticed that the cadets took pride in their appearance, and that the healthcare students’ uniforms did not inspire the same feeling. Vårdväskan began as a simple operation selling student messenger bags out of the founders’ living room, and the company now provides uniforms and accessories like shoes, stethoscopes, and watches to healthcare workers in all fields across Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark.

While they're only serving the Nordics for now, they have plans to expand into additional European markets in the future. With costs rising in paid marketing channels, they’re placing more attention on email marketing to help them achieve their growth goals. 

They switched to Mailchimp from their old Swedish email provider in May 2024 and have already seen an increase in email performance from their 300,000+ subscribers. We sat down with Creative Director Sebastian Gustafsson, CTO Lee Beijer, and Email Marketing Manager Simon Dahl to see how Mailchimp has helped them drive revenue and fuel their growth. 

The challenge: Scaling their marketing efforts across multiple Nordic markets while maintaining efficiency and personalization

Out of Vårdväskan’s 25 employees, 4 are in the marketing department and 1 is responsible for email marketing, and they want to keep headcount low as the company expands.

“We need to grow in these markets without significantly increasing the workflow on us. And obviously, all of these markets have their own individual cultures, styles, and communications, and we need to be able to cater to that without growing the team 2 or 3 times,” Lee says. “We send out 12 B2C newsletters every week and 4 B2B newsletters every week, so we need to be efficient and smart in the way we work.”

The tools: A personalized marketing plan, marketing API, segmentation, tagging, and marketing automation flows

Vårdväskan works with a Mailchimp Customer Success Manager* who provides personalized guidance on achieving their business goals. Lee says, “The fact that Mailchimp has a plan for us and has an idea of where to take us, and to even ask us what our goals and challenges are—it feels like we wouldn’t get that with other organizations. It feels like we are getting a lot of attention, which pushes us to use the system to its fullest." 

They connect their marketing tools to Mailchimp through Mailchimp’s API and are able to pull data from multiple sources into Mailchimp. They use a Swedish e-commerce platform, Norce, and Clerk.io, a personalization engine that gathers data on customer behavior, in addition to Google Analytics to help track email revenue. With all this information, they’re able to tag and segment their audience efficiently, and use marketing automation flows to design personalized, automated email campaigns, including welcome flows and abandoned cart reminders. 

They can send separate campaigns to B2B customers in which they tag different occupations, and to B2C customers promoting specific products. Soon, they’ll focus on customized flows, such as one that educates their audience and guides them through the wide array of products that Vårdväskan offers in order to drive more sales and cross sell.

The results: Engagement well above industry averages and a high ROI

The company started using Mailchimp in May 2024, and in less than a year, has achieved engagement well above industry averages, as well as a high return. “We are able to generate 30x revenue ROI through our email marketing efforts using Mailchimp,” Sebastian says. 

“By implementing proper segmentation in our everyday marketing emails and the newsletter flows we've developed, we've experienced a significant uplift in open and click-through rates,” Simon says. “This improvement boosts our revenue and strengthens the relevance of our communication and the business actions we’re able to take."

In fact, between October 2024 and March 2025, the first email in their welcome series drove high engagement, with a click-through rate of 5.4%, which is 315% higher than the e-commerce industry average of 1.73%, and an open rate of 58.7%.

Lee also says he has confidence in Mailchimp as a high-performance platform. “I don't think Mailchimp will ever come back and say ‘Sorry we can't handle that size database,’ or ‘Sorry we can't handle that number of emails going out.’ That was a problem we had with our previous system when we would be sending, let’s say, 100,000 emails at once.”

The platform's accessible interface and the support from Mailchimp, including personalized guidance, have been crucial in helping Vårdväskan work smarter and scale their operations without increasing their team size. “Working with Mailchimp compared to our old provider is so much more user-friendly and simple and smooth. With the drag-and-drop features and visual aspect of it, you can't even compare it,” Lee says.