Case study

Client

A niche-market female clothing retailer with over 60 UK high street stores

Sector

Clothing retail

Project

To append a range of differing external, address-based, variables to the client’s customer database and, through in-market testing, identify which measures should either be purchased or obtained directly from customers in order to improve the sales effectiveness of the client’s direct-to-customer marketing activity.

Analyses and Answers

Samples of Acorn, Prism and Mosaic data were obtained together with a market-leading, address-based, psychographic profile index. These were cross-matched to the customer database. Customer surveys were run to obtain additional information on customer circumstances including specific details relating to working status, hobbies, interests, media consumption habits and so forth.

These enabled us to profile and segment customers and relate those profiles to past likelihood to respond to marketing campaigns in total and to differing campaign types.

The profiles were projected across the c.200,000 customers in the customer database using data fusion.

These analyses enabled tests to be run to prove / disprove hypotheses relating not just to customers but also to types of store and store locations.

Actions

Tests were run over a period of one year which identified a 73% increase in the sales revenue that could be generated compared to untargeted mailings. Moreover, these larger uplifts were coming from smaller mailings so the overall ROI from the client’s marketing budget increased dramatically. The new targeting algorithms and methods of database enhancement identified by the project set the basis for all future mailing campaigns for the company.