DCA


crops years in advance, so you can’t just turn on supply to meet unprecedented demand. Many of our competitors shut down their retail operation and many Garden Centres were left in the lurch. We stayed supporting our retailers throughout.


Q. SETTING UP A NEW DIVISION DURING A PANDEMIC MUST HAVE BEEN A CHALLENGE. HOW DID YOU COPE? A. It was clear that we needed more space, but only had a short window in which affect a move. We wanted to stay local to the main business and were lucky to find the perfect site a few miles away in Newmarket. We made a moved to our new premises in October 2021 and were fully operational by end of November, ready for our peak in January-April. Te site has given us 3 times the space we had before. We mostly employ local staff, 30 are full time. During lockdown many were able to work from home as we have a cloud-based CRM system. In peak times we rank-up to around 60 staff. Tey undertake all the seed and hardware picking and dispatch, and we use a third-party distributor for our live plants. Our in-house customer service team is supported by a third-party call centre called Open Contact in Norwich. Tey handle overflow calls and customer service issues and we’ve worked with them successfully for six years now.


Q. TELL US MORE ABOUT YOUR MARKETING MIX AND COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY A. We use the Abacus data pool and test a variety of cold lists successfully, across all three brands. In 2017 we undertook more house-file profiling and segmentation which enabled us to be more targeted.


We email customers 3-4 times a week. In January 2021 we launched the ‘Mr Fothergill’s Big Green Gardening Book’ a 490-page catalogue, offering flowers, seed, veg and plants. It increased our average order value massively and provided customers with a one-stop shop. A physical catalogue is still very important to our customer base. Our customers are older with more time on their hands, they like to read and enjoy browsing the catalogues. We can also target different segments of the database more cost effectively. We regularly test different catalogues, formats and offers to increase retention and drive customer reactivation.


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With help from TA Design, we relaunched our DT Brown catalogue last year. We borrowed heavily from our heritage (since 1908) to give the catalogue a nostalgic look and feel – adding lots of content, hints, tips and interesting facts. We added a special growing diary that customers can use to keep track of their sowing and harvests and even added a wipe clean, laminated cover for longevity in the potting shed! We mail during August, September and October and again from January. We then do smaller supplementary mailings in February, March and April. We try and prolong the summer season by offering larger potted products, later in the season.


Q. WHAT CRM SYSTEM DO YOU USE? A. We use an Oracle owned system called NetSuite, which we introduced as an early adopter about 8 years ago. It is a cloud solution that delivers a real- time, 360-degree view of our customers.


Q. WHAT PERCENTAGE OF YOUR ORDERS ARE NOW ONLINE ? A. It differs by brand but approximately 80 per cent of our orders come in online – mostly driven by offline activity. It’s important to have a multi- channel approach and ensure that it’s as easy as possible for customers to buy and transact.


Q. WHAT TECHNIQUES DO YOU USE TO CROSS-SELL AND UPSELL CUSTOMERS? A. We will target customers with different offers/ upsells depending on their purchase history. For example, selling potato fertiliser to people who’ve bought potatoes. We also add small hardware focused catalogues within our product despatches to help upsell and include postcards promoting our other brands from time to time. For Mr Fothergill’s we used to send a seed catalogue to seed buyers and a plant catalogue to plant buyers, but now combine the whole range into one offering. Tis has seen response rates and average order values increase dramatically.


We use cold list data from Abacus, insert mini catalogues into gardening and national press, as well as undertaking a fair amount of off the page advertising. We’ve experimented with door drops in recent years and target online recruitment via PPC and google shopping feeds.


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