Greene King and Paragon DCX
200% improvement in email engagement thanks to new affinity scoring models
Background
Founded in 1799, Greene King is the UK’s leading pub company and brewer. It currently employs around 39,000 people across its five divisions: Local Pubs; Destination Food Brands; Premium, Urban and Venture Brands; Pub Partners; and Brewing & Brands. Greene King operates 2,600 pubs, restaurants and hotels across England, Wales and Scotland, of which approximately 1,600 are retail pubs, restaurants and hotels, and 1,000 are tenanted and leased pubs. Its leading retail brands include Hungry Horse, Farmhouse Inns and Chef & Brewer. Its industry-leading ale portfolio includes Greene King IPA, Old Speckled Hen, Abbot Ale, Ice Breaker, and Belhaven Best.
Greene King’s goal is to be the pride of British hospitality, famous for outstanding customer experiences. They want to build meaningful relationships with their customers, creating personalised communications that connect in the moments that matter, making every guest feel like a regular.
The challenge
Greene King had to re-evaluate what it knew about its customers – across all brands. The company needed to gain a better understanding of customer behaviour in our ‘new normal’ world in order to drive better marketing and business decisions.
Watch the full customer story
Watch our video which covers the full impact of Apteco marketing software on Greene King, presented by Paddy Purcell at Greene King and Matt Foord at Paragon DCX.
The Apteco Solution
Greene King’s Apteco FastStats solution houses customer information associated with each pub, restaurant, and hotel across the entire business, including transactional behaviour, marketing delivery, response history, and various loyalty scheme interaction touchpoints. Given the large number of patrons visiting a Greene King establishment across the UK every day, it was often difficult to understand who is, or has been, in a pub. To overcome this, Greene King moved their historic customer information into FastStats to gain a deeper understanding of customers and their behaviour through: bookings, Wi-Fi sessions, unique barcode redemptions at check-out, order and pay apps and loyalty apps.
Due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, what Greene King had previously learnt about a customer and their behaviour wasn’t guaranteed to still be true. With marketing activity paused, and pubs closed for an extended period of time, Greene King set out to re-discover everything they could about their customers. As social restrictions eased, pubs needed to change the service they provided to customers. Both social distancing and NHS Track and Trace policies were logistical challenges that had to be overcome. However, this also provided an effective way to capture customer data.
Previously, the main ways to identify whether a customer had been in a pub was through their Wi-Fi session data, table booking information, personalised voucher redemption, or their signing up to receive marketing communications via a Greene King website. The Covid-19 pandemic created a huge shift towards using customer booking information – a pre-requisite to ensure a table for lunch or dinner – as a customer acquisition source. On top of this, Greene King’s new “Order and Pay” app, which allowed customers to place orders directly from their table – as opposed to table service or at the bar – acted as another valuable source of data. Greene King was able to extract the rich transactional information associated directly with an individual customer dining at their restaurants.
DCX helped Greene King to bring these additional sources of powerful customer data into the FastStats system, bringing the database up to an impressive 17 million customer records, with a net total of 10 million distinct individuals, that spanned multiple Greene King brands.
Apteco allows Greene King to manage significant complexity with multiple brands and customer touchpoints, all managed efficiently and effectively to create clear insight and identify the optimal customer strategy. Through this project, Greene King has benefited from an increased understanding of our customers and optimised operational activity to engage them.
Paddy Purcell, Head of Customer Data and Analytics, Greene King
Paddy Purcell, Head of Customer Data and Analytics, Greene King
The impact on the business
Together Greene King and DCX have transformed the wider Greene King business’ use of data, helped them to learn more about customer behaviour, enhanced segmentation, and reduced customer churn – all through the power of Apteco FastStats. Greene King had to re-evaluate what it knew about its customers – across all brands. The company needed to gain a better understanding of customer behaviour in our ‘new normal’ world in order to drive better marketing and business decisions. Apteco FastStats has allowed Greene King to plug gaps in their data, and quickly and robustly test and learn from marketing activity. Through an integration with their ESP, flags and scores for segment look-alike models, dynamic churn models, and product-led affinity scores, Greene King has been able to tailor marketing communications to individuals and retain customers based on any slight variation in usual visit behaviour. DCX has worked with Greene King to transform their use of data, learn more about customer behaviour, and improve their use of Apteco FastStats.
24% increase in attitudinal segmentation reach, leading to 4% improvement in email engagement for customers with an assigned segment vs. those without.
200% improvement in email engagement thanks to new affinity scoring models.
£400k in customer offers saved and £3.3 million of potential revenue loss avoided by reducing database churn.
Data has always been at the heart of our partnership with Greene King. Apteco has allowed us constant access to the customer data we need to drive growth and innovation in a highly competitive market, while keeping the customer experience at the forefront of our shared vision.
Amy Jarvis, Head of Campaign Delivery, Paragon DCX
Amy Jarvis, Head of Campaign Delivery, Paragon DCX