Nisbets and Euler
Driving growth and shaping the way Nisbets engage with their customers.
Background
Nisbets is recognised as the leading supplier of catering equipment in the UK, supplying professional kitchen equipment to restaurants, hotels, bars and more. They have a global presence supplying directly in 10 countries and exporting all over the world. Over the past 35 years, they have established a reputation for industry excellence, providing the largest range of commercial kitchen equipment, competitively priced and delivered the very next day.
Nisbets has a rich history in Direct Marketing and their catalogue is still used by 64% of their customers today. For the last decade they’ve seen double digit growth and like most businesses the fastest growing part has been online. In 2018 Nisbets completed a full review of the marketing department which found that the majority of offline marketing centered on 2 key activities, the main catalogue and star buys, there was little/no insight or campaign measurement and a “Mass Approach” to marketing. It also found that with no differentiation between customers, investment was assigned to the wrong areas.
As Nisbets have developed and grown as an omni-channel business, understanding customers and their experience has been paramount. Acquiring, bringing together and utilising a vast number of data sources has been a key to success and since the introduction of Apteco FastStats in 2012 they’ve gained invaluable knowledge and insight that has driven growth and shaped the way Nisbets engage with their customers.
FastStats and PeopleStage are their primary tools for insight and campaign selections and is the single version of the truth around the customer, aggregating data from sources such as; CRM, ESP, Web Behaviour, demographic and third party data.
The Apteco solution
Nisbets marketing review led to the identification of considerable opportunity for future success. These included the creation of insight and a test and learn culture, to increase commercial effectiveness by measuring and understanding return on investment (ROI), to improve customer segmentation that measures potential (not just current revenue), to differentiate the marketing spend based on value and potential and to realign the marketing budget across the customer lifecycle.
A task force was created to look at how to efficiently use marketing budgets to drive effectiveness and return. A primary objective was to deliver a new insightful approach which can be used across the business. The task force identified 3 building blocks to meet the objectives. These were: potentiality segmentation to decide how much marketing to invest in each customer, tribes to describe what products customers need and personas to provide the marketing content. Qbase developed the Potentiality Segmentation and Tribes using FastStats, which created data persona’s which were then further enhanced with qualitative research. Clustering tools were used to combine frequency of orders, recency of orders and the value of orders into a single measure. Qbase also used FastStats decision trees, PWE to build models to understand prospects, lapsed and multi-buyers. PeopleStage was used to automate live multi-channel campaign journeys, through a seamless integration with Nisbett's ESP.
Understanding customers and their experience is paramount. Acquiring, bringing together and utilising data sources is key to success and Apteco FastStats has provided invaluable knowledge and insight that has driven growth and shaped the way Nisbets engage with their customers.
Adam Venn, Customer Data Manager
Adam Venn, Customer Data Manager
The impact on the business
As a result of this work the business now has a test and learn culture. Nisbets have tested which segments perform better based on what catalogue is received and how frequently they receive it, and are now testing the content of the catalogue as well. Nisbets has increased its commercial effectiveness by measuring and understanding return on investment (ROI) and a new department has been created to develop journeys for each of the segments, creating new KPIs and reports to monitor performance. Nisbets is also more customer centric using persona’s and tribes to ensure that the right content and the right product gets to the right customers. Nisbets are planning their 2020 mailing plan using potentiality segmentation.
Nisbets have tested performance of catalogue campaigns based on what catalogue prospects receive, mailing frequency and content.
Circulation of promotional flyers to the least responsive segments was halved, leading to over 1 million fewer sends planned in 2020 with no impact on sales
Most catalogue mailings were not profitable, however, through isolating the most responsive customers, tripling the catalogue sends from 2 to 6 a year for these best segments was justified and profitable
Google AdWords and PPC retargeting is planned for 2020 using Potentiality Segmentation to drive how much to invest in keywords per customer.
FastStats and PeopleStage are the primary tools for insight and campaign selections and is the single version of the truth around the customer, aggregating data from sources such as CRM, ESP, web behaviour, demographic and third-party data.
Ed Ryan, Customer Insight Manager
Ed Ryan, Customer Insight Manager