Background
The New Look story began in 1969 as a single fashion store in the UK. From there, New Look has grown to become a leading fast-fashion brand, with 519 stores in the UK and Ireland. Their online shop newlook.com ships to around 66 countries world-wide generating around 20% of their sales and they have more than 5 million followers on social media, across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
New Look's challenge was to deliver a more personalised, targeted marketing solution quickly, within budget, leveraging their existing assets, and that could be made accessible to all existing channels. But with increased pressure on producing more marketing material to drive revenue and profits, limited resources, and time restraints to do more personalisation than just salutations, along with old-world segmentation systems, the CRM team was feeling more like an email production line.
Plus, the CRM team was hindered by complicated non-transparent data processes and limited analytical resources, meaning they were largely reliant on other departments to access their data. And with no performance insights, business buy in and investment in marketing was limited.
Watch the video
Watch the video of the full case study, presented by Marie-Louise Lord from New Look and Graham Burton from Planning-inc, at Apteco Live 2019
The Apteco Solution
New Look achieved a practical and effective Customer Data Platform (CDP) using new and innovative techniques within and around Apteco marketing software. To achieve this their partners, Planning-inc, focused their solution on 5 key areas: Connect, Access, Amplify, Activate and Clarify. The team were able to quickly access granular data from both online and offline sources by connecting to 1.5 billion rows of data daily through their cloud-based data platform. FastStats Designer was used to optimise the build speed meaning builds could be done in less than an hour.
Apteco FastStats provided direct access to multiple users in the marketing team to see and act on data, insights and predictive models. Combined with next best product modelling and complementary recommendations, the marketing team were able to identify opportunities with existing customers and promote upsell offers. For the first time New Look had the ability to use machine learning to deliver individual relevant content.
Working with Planning Inc, the New Look team created a multi-channel campaign management system with built in reporting and analysis. Using near real time data feeds, the team were able to react to purchases and online basket abandons. A reporting suite with daily reporting capabilities for all campaigns gave the team the ability to prove to the business the genuine value of marketing in a consistent way across multiple channels.
Everyone in CRM and data marketing has a unique opportunity in that we have access to our customer behaviour data, and we have the opportunity to do something meaningful with it, and that is what we wanted to do.
Marie-Louise Lord, Senior CRM Manager, New Look
Marie-Louise Lord, Senior CRM Manager, New Look
The impact on the business
New Look’s CRM transformation project achieved a practical, effective Customer Data Platform (CDP). Software was configured to meet the needs of each client, with a persistent, unified customer database containing personal identifiers used to target marketing messages and track individual-level marketing results. Accessible to other systems, data stored in the CDP can be used by other systems for analysis and to manage customer interactions.
New Look were able to split results to see exactly where 85% of their revenue was coming from.
New Look was able to make its messaging more relevant, so that the customer appreciated receiving it.
Through the creation of best product modelling and product recommendations, a significant uplift in profit was recorded.
Increase in 57% in web visits with over 1000 impressions and 3.7 x return on advertising spend.
We wanted to embrace the customer in every decision, making this second nature and engrained in our culture, essentially transforming us from an email marketing team to an established CRM function that serves the business.
Marie-Louise Lord, Senior CRM Manager, New Look
Marie-Louise Lord, Senior CRM Manager, New Look