Email Database increase by 40% in 6 months!

7 Jan 2019 Dominic Comments Off on Email Database increase by 40% in 6 months!

I recently came across some work I did for a previous client (Notcutts) which I thought I would post to show how I managed to grow their database by 40% by implementing a multichannel data capture campaign.

Notcutts are a well established chain of national garden centres with turnover around £60 million. Their office is based down in Woodbridge, Suffolk and I worked with them on a consultancy basis over 14 months – primarily to overhaul their online offering and bring it up to speed with the competition.

In my time there, I drove 40% YOY increase in revenue as well as improving conversion, introducing new commercial partners and overhauling the trading structure – all contributing to the 40% revenue increase.

However my key achievement was significantly increasing their email database by adding 156k email addresses of existing customers to their database by implementing a strategy to address a major issue they had with customer data. Below is a summary of how I achieved this growth.

The problem

Notcutts, like many other garden centres in the UK, have a discount membership club whereby if existing customers signed up to enrol (at a cost of £10), they were entitled to member only discounts and options to attend monthly events.

The problem was that, whilst they had 400,000 members in the scheme, they actually only had email addresses for 40% of this scheme – meaning they were not communicating with 240,000 customers! The reason for this was that the loyalty scheme was not only a pen and paper sign up in store, but data capture in store was non existent. Notcutts had not moved with the times as as a result were losing customers.

There were also other risks to the business because of this lack of focus on getting the customer data:

• Subsequently they could not identify lapsing / lapsed customers
• Customers with email addresses on average spent £39 more than those without
• Stores were losing customers quicker than they were gaining customers
• Email acquisition rates had dropped from 94% to 15% YOY growth
• As the program matured, the initial email database was shrinking
• No data capture strategy in store meant losing new customer revenue
• Manual process for data capture had been clunky
• Staff engagement low at tillpoint in store
• Customers had no motivation to give email address
• Profiling of customers was limited (No DOB, gender etc)

The solution

Based on the above, the clear solution was to look at a simple and easy way to get customers to provide data which we could then match up to the existing Privilege customer database and update the 60% of Privilege customers whose data we did not have. We also wanted a solution which enabled the collection of new customer data from store visits and try and get these new customers signed up to the Privilege scheme in store.

From the various different companies we looked at, the solution we decided to implement was a simple scratchcard prize draw solution provided by ODICCI. Working with them we printed up 3 months worth of individually numbered scratchcards which customers would get with every purchase – with monthly prizes of up top £500.

Customers would scratch the card and go through to the landing page hosted on ODICCI platform, where they would enter details to discover if they had won. We also asked if they were a current Privilege customer and if so what was their Privilege card number.

The results

Over the course of a 3 month campaign which we rolled out across 18 stores nationwide, the results were impressive to say the least:

40% database growth – the email database increased from 160k to 224k!
20% conversion rate – 20% of all cards given out resulted in an email address captured
65% of acquired email addresses were new in the database

The cost of the campaign with ODICCI was £31k – a total cost per email acquired of .48p. Whilst slightly high, the profile of the Notcutts customer was such that AOV per customer was around £600 – customers bought into the more expensive garden furniture ranges. In addition, the customer lifetime value was very good.

All in all this was a very successful campaign which improved Notcutt’s database size significantly – you can read more on the Odicci website.

Categories: Acquisition, All Posts, Planning, Retention, Strategy, Why me?