EXCELLENCE IN ANALYTICS FOR MARKETING – B2C ARGOS
A very happy Argos team receive their award from sponsor Daniel Guest of R-Cubed (left) while Database Marketing Managing Editor Antony Begley (right) looks on.
Excellence in Analytics for Marketing: Argos A
s a company that has long made exceptionally good use of database marketing, Argos has been using targeted email campaigns as part of
its eCRM program for a number of years ensuring content and products are relevant for customers based on their behaviour. While this programme has been very successful, the capability was restricted by a reliance on having to manually nominate products and build the creative templates. This meant customers having to be grouped up to receive a handful of one-size-fits- all category templates rather than the truly personalised recommendations Argos wanted.
THE RECOMMENDER ENGINE To deliver a more bespoke customer experience, Argos engaged planning-inc to develop a solution – and that solution come to life as a bespoke recommendation engine that analyses what combinations of products are bought by customers, then identifies which products to promote to which customers or prospects. The power of the Recommender engine is then transferred into a targeted, relevant email campaign that customers receive the day after they have made a purchase. Offers have close affinity to the previous day’s purchase, prioritising the offers with the highest discounts. The engine is even able to colour match to the original
24 November 2011
purchase for maximum impact.. A daily email campaign was designed to deliver the top six most relevant post sale recommendations to the customer’s inbox within a 24 hour window after initial purchase. And the results? Recommender has enabled Argos to deliver highly targeted, individual communications to customers, achieving an additional revenue stream which in its six weeks test period generated over £130,000 in incremental revenue.
The campaign is still being rolled out, but over a 12 month period is forecast to deliver close to 10 million emails to customers. If the incremental revenues achieved in the test period are borne out over the year, this is expected to equate to £2m of additional revenue. With campaign delivery costs of only around £25,000 a year, campaign revenue ROI is a stonking 8,000%!
ANALYTIC EXCELLENCE The Recommender makes use of association mining, aiming to discover and predict co-
occurrence relationships among activities performed by specific individuals or groups. It uses historic orders and demographic data from the SCV database to build a set of rules based on products purchased by similar customers in a 10 week time span. Additional predictors (such as demographics and non purchase behaviour) were also incorporated into the analysis, enabling more specific recommendations.
The 10 week period was important in order to
differentiate Recommender from traditional basket analysis tools which look at individual orders. An Argos customer’s basket rarely contains all required items at a single point in time. Various parameters keep the predictions as relevant as possible to the customer, to keep prices aligned to known historic spend, for example. Compared to previous Argos email sends, the Recommender generated emails saw open rate uplifts of 34.6%, click-through uplifts of 15.2% and conversion to sale uplifts of 99.5%. You can’t argue with numbers like that. n
www.dmarket.co.uk
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48