Footshop: Driving Additional Profit through Intelligent Targeting
Introduction
Foot Shop is a family owned retailer selling specialist footwear, socks, hosiery and foot comfort products across multiple sales channels, including mail order, wholesale, internet and retail shops.
Established in the early 1980’s, Foot Shop has grown from a small company originally supplying DIY shoe kits into a multi-brand, multi-channel retailer. Amongst its brands is Cosyfeet, the leading UK brand of Extra Roomy footwear; Walktall, the specialist online retailer for tall men’s branded footwear, clothing and accessories; Lookatmycrazyshoes.com, retailers of fashionable and functional footwear; and disabled footwear specialists, Healthyshoes .co.uk and Disabledaccessories.com.
Challenge
Foot Shop recognised that access to its customer data would be highly advantageous to the business, as it would facilitate a deeper understanding of its client base and enable the business to divide, segment, and then communicate with its customers appropriately and more effectively. However, with its customer data held within a SQL database off site and also within the CRM system Elucid, access to it for marketing purposes was extremely difficult.
The challenge for Occam therefore, was to provide Foot Shop with access to their customer data for querying, analysis, planning and campaign purposes with the aim of driving additional profit through intelligent targeting based on customer profile and purchasing habits.
Solution
The first step in achieving Foot Shop’s objectives was the creation of a consolidated data set from the SQL and Elucid data sources in order to identify and profile key customers for cross- and up-sell activity across the database. With a single data source in place, Occam set about applying deduplication and suppression techniques to produce a clean data source to be used for marketing purposes. Tackling data quality issues head-on at this early stage, meant that Occam could then process subsequent data supplies into FastStats much faster and more reliably, as any key issues had previously been addressed.
With the data preparation complete, the next key phase was the creation of a FastStats solution and the subsequent deployment of the Discoverer application on client site. Designed specifically to give staff access to Foot Shop’s data for querying, analysis and campaign purposes, Occam supported the implementation of its solution by providing full training and support from its software consultants.
With the system in place, response information was then fed back into the Foot Shop database and used to refine future campaigns, along with the use of transactional and basket analysis to determine the next best or most likely purchase per customer. This enabled communications to be tailored for cross-sell and up-sell depending on previous purchase patterns.
Results
Occam’s successful implementation of the FastStats solution has enabled Foot Shop to bring back in-house the insight and access to marketing data that was previously managed by an external agency. Importantly, this has been achieved very cost effectively through a combination of sensible data preparation within the originating data source and comparatively low software costs under the Occam FastStats bureau licence.
The ability to clearly identify which customers should be used for different campaigns and offers, whilst avoiding those customers who are unlikely to respond positively has significantly improved the effectiveness of Foot Shop’s marketing campaigns:
- Targeting and customer selections have improved email turnover by over 200%
- Project planning times have been cut by 50%
- In the last 6 months marketing costs have reduced by 10% due to more effective targeting of customers
- Sales have increased by 15%
