Prospecting by retargeting

“CRM is dead and PRE is the future”, declared Screwfix’s head of ecommerce John Ashton in a session called Personalisation, Prospecting, and Profiting in 2010 at this year’s ECMOD conference. “PRE”, he explained, stands for Personalised Recommendation Engine and it is currently responsible for 15 percent of total business at Screwfix.

Whereas customer relationship management (CRM) is defined as managing the interactions your customer has with your brand to drive acquisition and retention strategies, according to Ashton, the personalised recommendation engine is all about using your customer’s actual behaviour with your company to instantly add value to your business.

In a nutshell, a PRE is a program that uses the data your business has on an individual to show that person products that he may be interested in based on his behaviour on your website. This means using the pages and products he viewed, what’s been added to the cart, past purchases, or what other customers like him have bought to form an idea of the products that may also be of interest to him. At Screwfix, for instance, CRM meant targeted offers, say, for all plumbers on the database. Using a PRE Screwfix is now able to display offers at an individual level, based on what is in the shopper’s basket, or what he’s looked at before.

Moreover, in 12 weeks’ time, said Ashton, Screwfix will have achieved a single customer view across all of its channels—trade counters, catalogue and website. This will enable the trade counters to see exactly what someone has bought in the past whether online or in-store, and instead of suggesting generic offers like “would you like a measuring tape with your order”, staff can suggest more relevant products, for example, copper piping as an additional purchase to someone who has a boiler in his shopping basket. This tactic will also be applied to Screwfix’s email marketing to personalise email offers and make its 1.2 million weekly emails more “interesting”, added Ashton.

Wrapping up his presentation, Ashton told delegates how Screwfix is using retargeting. He explained that of Screwfix.com’s 700,000 weekly web visitors, 650,000 leave without buying anything. However, in the past six months, the company has been “retargeting” those that have left empty-handed. Ashton described how Screwfix is using a tool called Criteo, which tracks users’ online behaviour using cookies to display ads to them once they have left the site. The results are impressive says Ashton, who added that before using these targeted ads, which can display to users the last few products they viewed on the screwfix website, he had struggled to see any sort of return using online display advertising. From Ashton’s presentation it appears that it’s no longer about reaching out to prospective customers, who may never have heard of you; it’s about maximising the traffic you are already getting by personalising the experience.--MT

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The October Catalogue Log

St Nick lugging a bag brimming with toys has become a near-universal symbol of Christmas. For the weeks leading up to the holiday, you could substitute a postie for Santa, and a mailbag bulging with catalogues for the sack of toys.

In October alone, Catalogue e-business logged in 184 catalogues. That’s second in volume only to September, when we tallied 212 catalogues. And one could argue that we would have received even more catalogues last month were it not for the intermittent CWU/Royal Mail strikes.

Not only was our mailbox full of catalogues, but the catalogues were full of promotions. The number of catalogues that featured sales or discounts on their covers was the same that offered no special promotions at all: 76, or 41.3 percent. Only August and May had a higher percentage of sales promotions, at 43.7 percent and 42.6 percent respectively. The percentage of catalogues offering free delivery reached a year high of 21.7 percent. The percentage of catalogues offering a gift with purchase, meanwhile, was 16.8 percent, behind only June (17.8 percent) and August (16.9 percent).

Several of the cataloguers committed the marketing equivalent of hiding their light under a bushel: not promoting significant offers on the cover. Fashion mailer Carr & Westley, for instance, tells readers, “No extra charge for post and packing within the UK”—not on the front or back cover but on the inside front cover. Tools cataloguer/retailer Screwfix offers free delivery on orders of more than £50, though again you’d have to open the catalogue and scan the inside front cover to learn that fact. I don’t understand why you’d offer a buying inducement like free P&P without promoting it. Are the companies secretly hoping no-one will take them up on the offer? The only logical explanation I can come up with is that they’re testing the effectiveness of free P&P, though I didn’t notice any mechanisms in place to help in tracking such a test. If anyone can illuminate me, please do.

Among a few notable catalogues we received: Food gifts mailer Virginia Hayward offered 12.5 percent off its Christmas hampers. I assume that percentage of discount was selected to tie in with the fact that Virginia Hayward is celebrating its 25th anniversary, though maybe the company settled on that number simply because it’s more attention-getting than, say, 10 percent off. Viking Direct sent the most distinct editions of any cataloguer in October: eight, including the 484-page Office Buyers Directory, a 72-page November Sale edition, and a 56-page Pricebuster Sale edition.

Several of the October catalogues made a point of alerting shoppers of their cut-off ordering dates for Christmas delivery, something we’ll no doubt see more of among November’s crop of mailpieces. Silk-flowers cataloguer Bloom will take orders until 18th December for standard Christmas delivery and 21st December for expedited delivery. Toys cataloguer/retailer Early Learning Centre lists 20th December as its deadline. The last order date for Christmas delivery at Rainbow Flowers & Gifts is 18th December. So far CJ Wildlife offers the latest deadline: 21st December for standard delivery to mainland UK.

The Executive Christmas Cards and Promotional Calendars catalogue that raises funds for the RNLI has the dubious distinction of the most incomprehensible promotion, involving a sister company of Kingsmead Publications, which handles the catalogue operations for the RNLI. I think it’s simply a 50 percent discount on stationery from Simply Letterheads, good from 13th December through March, but it’s wrapped in some “clever” verbiage about how taking advantage of the discount enables you to in effect spend nothing on Christmas cards next year, because the money you saved on the stationery will balance out the money you spend. Why not just state, “When you buy cards from this catalogue you can get a whopping 50 percent off your stationery at Simply Letterheads”? That seems like a strong enough proposition in and of itself, and as Lisa Simpson taught me, simplest is best.--SC