Phil Geary CMO, The Entertainer
EMAIL MARKETING
send emails recommending suitable offers by age and gender.
Thetoyshop.com had looked the same for all customers whether they had purchased online or visited the site before. Customers had been telling the company it needed to provide better personalisation – offering them the most relevant products, promotions and content. The Message Cloud powers segmentation around brands using data gathered of what customers like or have bought before, and then intelligently uses this information to drive smarter email personalisation. This also allows for personalisation around events such as birthdays, something they were unable to do before. Since using the platform, The Entertainer has launched its ‘Birthday Club’, which allows customers to give the age and gender of all children they buy presents for, meaning the company can now send messages with personalised birthday present recommendations. The Entertainer prides itself on
excellent customer service and the expertise of its staff in-store, so to replicate that level of quality online was essential. Since using The Message Cloud it has been able to serve customers with relevant content for an enhanced digital experience, better reflecting the outstanding in-store experience.
The Solution
All transactional and marketing campaign programs were migrated to The Message Cloud, allowing for 100 per cent personalised and fully responsive messages driven by customer behaviour. A single customer view database was built, incorporating the tools needed to maximise all data to increase lifetime value and deliver real-time personalisation for web and email. Alongside the creation of this database, a new email service
solution was integrated to allow segmentation of email addresses using attributes from the database. The recommendations engine now gathers data while the customer browses, interacts and orders from the website. The Message Cloud solution
ensured The Entertainer not only gained exposure to a larger audience but converted the highest possible number of consumers into lifetime customers. By improving communications to prospective, first-time and returning customers, it saw a significant return on investment by offering live personalisation. The platform enables The
Entertainer to react to stock levels the second an email is opened. Sales are maximised because emails always show products that are in stock to customers. Within the toy industry, the most popular toys go in and out of stock very quickly, so live personalisation is essential to swop products in real-time when they run out.
A big win for The Entertainer has been segmenting subject lines, something it wasn’t able to do before The Message Cloud. It has doubled open rates across campaigns because it can now personalise subject lines to different groups of customers. This segmentation enables different messages – for example ‘50 per cent off Star Wars’ or ‘50 per cent off My Little Pony’ depending on preferences, and therefore gets much better engagement than sending out a generic message. Countdown timers within
personalised emails are another useful tool that increased conversion rates for The Entertainer. Seeing a moving countdown gives a sense of urgency to a customer for the ending of an event or promotion, telling them for example they have four hours left until a sale ends or how long it is until the Christmas delivery cut off.
The Entertainer has increased the number of people shopping with it for a second time or a third time by 60 per cent year on year. Previously only 14 per cent of its online customers made a repeat purchase, so it had a huge opportunity in offering personalised recommendations. Brands spend a lot of time and money winning new customers – The Message Cloud lets companies nurture and retain customers they have spent resource and budget to acquire. The Entertainer has found this focus on retention is also a more cost effective form of marketing. Phil Geary, CMO at The
Entertainer, says: “SmartFocus helps to make our customer experience be the best it can be, irrespective of what channel we’re using, and the SmartFocus Message Cloud ensures that my team and I can offer perfect user experience every time. Replicating our in-store experience when each and every one of our customers visits our website or receives one of our marketing messages is critical to us. The SmartFocus solution offered us all of the capabilities we needed in a single, comprehensive platform.”
The Future
The Entertainer has doubled its open rates across email campaigns
x2 57 issue 28 summer 2016
The next step with The Message Cloud for The Entertainer is to bring personalisation and segmentation onto
thetoyshop.com. This will allow the company to segment on past purchase history and browsing behaviour, and will enable a home page that reflects products and brands customers have bought or looked at before. Customer behaviour on email can influence customer content online and vice versa. This cross-channel approach is becoming the benchmark of personalisation that customers are coming to expect.
thetoyshop.com
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