Work/
An e-commerce client
We helped to grow a Direct to Consumer eCommerce business – targeting and growing a customer database that kept coming back and kept the business moving forward.
With stagnant sales and soaring customer attrition rates we were appointed by this client to radically reshape their marketing strategy.
The first thing we did was to analyse their transactional data. We needed to find out who their customers were and more about their buying behaviour.
We quickly discovered key insights that went on to inform a new marketing strategy. Firstly, we noticed a significant level of customer duplication that showed that they had around 25% less customers than they thought. This was a significant finding because it meant that they could not expect as many future orders as they had hoped from their existing customers; so further acquisition would be even more critical to their growth plan.
Then we analysed purchase frequency and quickly identified that most customers were not coming back. This had even wider implications because it meant that the customers they had acquired were not valuable.
Thirdly, we next conducted a customer profiling exercise to try and understand who their customer base were. This revealed that, whilst they had successfully recruited a large number of customers, many were not the type of people who could expect to become loyal customers over the medium and longer term.
Using our 3 big insights, we set to work on turning things around.
- Finding their people: we knew we needed to attract a different type of customer, one who was less discount focussed and who could become loyal customers for the brand. This led us to completely rebrand their digital platforms to focus more on their heritage and quality products than on discounted offers.
- Nurturing loyalty: customer retention was critical to the growth strategy. Once acquired, each new customer had to be nurtured to make sure we fostered loyalty and relied less on the one hit wonders. To do this, we developed a customer segmentation strategy was introduced to facilitate this customised nurturing strategy through email marketing.
Our plan was to think of the long game, not short-term wins. In the beginning, many of the customers they had acquired before we started working with them were still likely to lapse. But over time, using our new customer life stage segmentation, we started observing positive changes in the overall retention rates for newer customers, many more were returning to make a second, or subsequent purchase than previously.