Published on the 11/07/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Listed clothing retailer Specialty Fashion Group has a team of seven managing its data, providing marketing insights, and delivering a hip pocket sales boost…
Specialty Fashion Group – the entity behind high street clothing brands such as Millers, Katies and City Chic – is using its customer data to hone marketing campaigns, and claims it has achieved a three percent sales uplift as a result.
In the fashion retail sector, where margins are slender, that’s a result to be savoured.
Chief financial officer Alison Henriksen, said that the company had collected data on about six million customers, and had an email database of around 2.8 million. In addition the company had data associated with 32 million garment sales a year, plus two million visits to its web sites. She said that in a typical year the company had 180 million interactions with customers, and that the information captured as a result was being used to engage with customers more effectively by honing marketing campaigns.
“We can segment customers knowing that she likes a bargain, fashion, a certain price point, frequency of shopping or types of garment and send a tailored email,” explained Henriksen.
She said that the company was also able to measure the success of a campaign by running control groups to measure campaigns. She said a typical marketing campaign email would now be opened by 40-50 percent of recipients, and up to 50 percent of them would then click through to the web site and a potential sale.
“We have an uplift of three percent in sales across the control,” said Henriksen. She claimed this provided a return against the cost of running a campaign which ran to “thousands of percent”.
While Specialty Fashion is an enthusiastic adopter of data analytics, Henriksen said that in general Australian retailers were “many years behind the UK”, which is acknowledged as a pioneer in the field.
Underpinning the company’s activities is an intelligent marketing and analytics tool, originally developed by Australian firm Alterian, since taken over by UK owned company SDL which Specialty Fashion installed two years ago. The company’s chief strategy officer Joe Stanhope, on a visit to Australia this week, said that the ability to exploit vast reservoirs of customer data represented an
“equal opportunity disruption” for industry, adding that those companies which learned how to best exploit data would achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.
SDL’s focus is on financial services, gaming, retail and publishing. Its key customers in Australia include Best Western, TabCorp and Rebel Sport.
