THE CHALLENGE

Since its inception in 1981, Freedom’s vision has been providing beautiful things for the home available to everyone. Today, it is one of Australasia’s most well-known furniture and homewares retailers, with 63 stores across Australia and New Zealand, as well as a thriving online business.

In August 2019, the retailer relaunched its myFreedom loyalty program in Australia – to deliver more relevant, engaging and timely offers to its customers, supporting customer retention and improving purchase frequency.

The company recognised that to maintain its market-leader status; it needed a partner who could help leverage this influx of data and bolster its capabilities in customer analytics, marketing automation and reporting – with the goal of ultimately delivering more meaningful customer communications.

THE SOLUTION

Datamine worked with Freedom’s Marketing and IT teams to perform an initial assessment of its current people, process and platform capabilities. This led to the implementation of marketing automation technology, alongside an integrated campaign and analytics data layer. This was further supported by campaign strategy and execution support from Datamine. 

This allows the business to track and report on the performance and effectiveness of its loyalty program. Deep Dives into behavioural data can be used to build customer profiles and clusters to deliver personalised customer initiatives right across the business – from strategy development to campaign optimisation.

THE RESULT

With greater visibility across its loyalty program, Freedom can identify and leverage new opportunities and customer segments to add more value for its customers and drive a direct increase in sales.

Datamine helped the business streamline its priorities across data, marketing automation and analytics to ensure maximum ROI, as well as build an appropriate level of internal capability that will scale over time, setting Freedom up for ongoing success in the future.

Underpinned by a simple customer proposition, the program has been able to deliver key milestones including:

• 650,000 + members
• Greater than 80% of sales associated with a myFreedom member
• Reward vouchers generating an incremental spend uplift of circa 3x
• Customers spending 22% more when they become members
  
  

The culmination of this partnership saw Freedom voted as a finalist in the Loyalty Program/Campaign of the Year in the InsideRetail Retailer 2022 Awards 2022, a testament to the power of optimised and efficient customer loyalty data.

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THE CHALLENGE

Leading pet retailer Animates is all about great customer experiences. It provides the best care for pets in its in-store services, sells top-quality products and offers expert advice to pet owners – also known as pet parents.

Until recently, that focus on experience didn’t flow through to Animates’ digital channels. With more customers interacting with the retailer online and increasing competition within the pet retail space, that needed to change.

Animates has watched an increasing proportion of its customers drift towards online channels over the last few years. More customers were taking advantage of digital options like online shopping, online research before making a purchase and digital communication with the store. The effects of the pandemic exacerbated this trend, with customers shopping online as a first and only option during lockdowns and restrictions.

The retailer also wanted to grow its relevancy with pet parents, and to deliver supportive, personalised online experiences to match its in-store approach – so Animates approached Datamine for help.

THE SOLUTION

Creating seamless campaigns and personalised communications involved several elements.

Automation: Datamine used marketing automation platform Acoustic for online communication and targeting. This meant that even during periods of disuption, the marketing team could continue to deliver sophisticated, strategic campaigns.

Customised communications: Responding to certain online behaviours, such as ordering kitten food, triggered communications ensures that every customer has a consistent positive, personalised experience. Datamine helped to optimise and execute these comms using the great campaign and content ideas from the Animates team.

Staff onboarding: Datamine provided support and training for new Animates team members, making sure that staff have a consistent level of knowledge for communicating with customers using the Acoustic platform.

Proactive tracking: key statistics are continually tracked, with information feeding back into Animates’ current campaigns. This acts as a measurement, keeping campaigns on track and alerting the team about any issues.

THE RESULT

By working together, Datamine and Animates transformed the way Animates communicates with its pet parents and improved processes for employees. Automating personalised content for each online customer means that the business can deliver a consistently positive experience, no matter what channel they’re using.

Automation also helped when the Animates marketing team was under the pump. Because everything was set up to work with little manual input, the team could focus on higher-priority work – particularly during the worst of the pandemic.

Training with Datamine meant that all employees could deliver the same level of service, contributing to a better customer experience and reducing the impact of employee turnover at the same time.

The result? A business set up to deal with challenges and ongoing change while delivering a seamless, streamlined experience to its online customers.

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THE CHALLENGE

Torpedo7 is New Zealand’s top outdoor adventure retailer specialising in bike, snow, camping, water gear and outdoor clothing. With many successful stores across New Zealand, Torpedo7 had an opportunity to evolve their network in Auckland. Torpedo7 came to Datamine to understand how they could optimise their central Auckland store network and identify the best opportunities within the Auckland region for new site locations.

THE SOLUTION

Using a combination of Torpedo7’s data, granular customer spending data from our retail tracking service and census information, Datamine modelled what would happen if Torpedo7 were to build a site in every region (SA2) in Auckland.

The deliverable was an interactive map that highlighted the likely performance of each new store. Key metrics such as total and predicted store sales, network uplift and cannibalisation gave Torpedo7 the tools to understand their performance across the Auckland market and identify what the optimal locations for site placement were.

THE RESULT

This project has enabled Torpedo7 to identify growth opportunities across the Auckland region and provided a deeper analysis of geographical areas with the most significant potential for profitable sales. This data-driven strategy has assisted Torpedo7 in optimising store planning and ensuring future investment strategies are well-positioned for success.

THE CHALLENGE

Datamine was approached by an international retailer that wanted a more advanced forecasting solution.  The company had thousands of stores, each of which had its own way of deciding what products to stock on any given day.  This led to a lack of central visibility, difficulty optimising the range and wastage that was 3x the industry average.

The organisation found that these challenges led to disappointing customer experiences, as well as inconsistencies that made it difficult to implement sustained improvements across the brand.

THE SOLUTION

Datamine created a forecasting application that allowed the retailer to understand the likely demand for the products at each individual store, depending on the time of day and the day of the week.  This solution allowed the client to overlay business rules and constraints, creating an optimal recommendation of products to stock on an ongoing basis.

As an additional bonus, the forecasting application also consolidated supplier activities and minimised the disruption of stockouts.

THE RESULT

In the first 12 months after implementing the forecasting solution, the retailer achieved an increase in sales of over 8% and an overall waste reduction of around 17%.  The recommendations from the application successfully determined which were the right products to stock in a given time and place to best serve customer needs.

Another beneficial outcome of the solution was the improved ability to onboard new products and get them into the right places more quickly.

THE CHALLENGE

In line with its business strategy, Farmers wanted a way to better predict which of its customers were likely to make a purchase in a high value and high margin category.  The goal was to identify these valuable customers and enable more targeted marketing in an effort to drive sales.  Farmers assumed that the high value purchases were made on a reasonably random basis, so another goal of the project was to determine whether or not there were actually any patterns to capitalise on.

THE SOLUTION

Datamine worked with Farmers to create a predictive model that would be able to forecast which customers are likely to come in store to purchase a high value product.  To build the model, Datamine used a neural network, which is a machine learning technique that enabled the team to pull out patterns held deep within the transactional data.

In doing the analysis, we found that there were patterns in the data that help predict someone’s likelihood to make a high value or high margin purchase – things like the time since their last purchase in other store categories, age, shopping behaviour and other valuable variables.

THE RESULT

Using the model, Datamine successfully identified customers likely to make a high value or high margin purchase.  The goal is now to engage and drive conversion to purchase, as some of these sales may go to a competitor without such targeted intervention.  The neural network making these predictions can be run regularly for ongoing accuracy as customers send different signals via their shopping behaviour over time.  In deploying the model, the team has determined the variables that are most likely to lead to a customer purchasing a high value item, allowing Farmers to market more effectively to specific groups moving forward.

THE CHALLENGE

A major retailer wanted to optimise their pricing strategy as a part of the overall promotional mix.  As a start, the retailer was keen to increase their revenue in a particular department and optimise promotions to drive the most sales and ensure they were pricing their products in the best way.  The client engaged Datamine to do a price sensitivity analysis in order to identify potential areas for improvement.

THE SOLUTION

Datamine used the retailer’s own transactional data and BI data to analyse the price elasticity of various products, helping identify products where price was a key driver of volume.  We noticed that all the products in a certain department sold more when the price was reduced, so we then ranked the products by price elasticity, reviewing Summer and Winter separately to account for seasonal differences in demand and availability. 

As a part of this analysis, the team also considered whether price reductions for each product could help drive spend on other products in that department or across the store.

THE RESULT

The retailer is using these insights to set up and run future promotions.  The findings of this project have provided them with direction and support and are complementing the team’s specialist department knowledge and supplier negotiation skills. 

As an extra component to this project, Datamine was able to establish the retailer’s current market share and position in the market compared to independent, niche retailers in the same category.  This is providing a benchmark so that market share can be measured regularly as changes are made to the pricing strategy.