Bringing Customers Back with a Multi-Channel Media Strategy
BlueLabs helped a large retail chain increase its rate of purchases by 10% and generate more than $350,000 in additional revenue by revamping its analytics strategy.
The Problem
One of the largest retailers in the United States was facing an all-too-common challenge in the digital age: shoppers visited its stores to test merchandise but finalized their purchases elsewhere. The retailer asked BlueLabs to help it identify ways of solving this problem with a new, data-driven media analytics strategy.
Our Solution
Based on extensive interviews with the retailer’s sales, marketing, and analytics teams, we formulated an action plan for one of our client’s priority products to find out which tactics worked best with specific customers.
Assess the Data
First, we took a complete inventory of data available from the retailer. We then worked directly with their internal team to clean and match their data with BlueLabs’ national consumer file. This enabled our client to understand, for the first time, the true extent of the problem by knowing which shoppers didn’t finalize their purchase or had it finalized by other household members.
Segment the Market
Using variables like demography, geography, consumer history, and online behavior, we identified and recommended specific sub-groups that would be the best targets for marketing and advertising outreach.
Test Messaging & Channels
We worked with the retailer’s marketing team to design and test several advertising experiments, each with different types of messaging via different channels (direct mail, email, and social media). We delivered each targeted segment to the retailer’s digital, social, and direct mail vendors. The goal of this was to determine the most effective combinations of outreach and content for each individual customer based on their actual buying behavior.
The Results…
We found that this advertising outreach increased the rate of purchases by 10% and generated more than $350,000 in additional revenues for our client.
Mail was the highest performing channel; substantially outperforming email and social, even when accounting for its higher costs. It had a sales return-on-advertising-spend (ROAS) of 49x for one message and 20x for a second message, compared with marginal gains for email and social. Moreover, customers who received messages by mail were more likely to purchase, increasing the retailer’s profit per household by about 550%.
At the retailer’s request, BlueLabs also provided a comprehensive report with recommendations for improving the retailer’s analytics infrastructure. The retailer’s board approved all of BlueLabs’ thirteen strategic analytics recommendations.