UniFida helps Wentworth Wooden Jigsaw Company 'make the pieces fit' in its customer marketing

Background

Since its foundation in 1991, the Wentworth Wooden Jigsaw Company has been producing unique and intricately crafted wooden jigsaw puzzles from its factory in the heart of the Wiltshire countryside. A growing number of Wentworth Puzzle enthusiasts around the world buy direct from its website or mail-order catalogues and its puzzles are also stocked by museums, galleries and gift shops around the world.

At the end of 2017 the company appointed UniFida to provide customer data platform (CDP) technology to help it gain better insights into its global customer base and, in effect, to ‘make the pieces fit’ in its quest to build a single, integrated view of its customers.

Solutions provided

Wentworth Puzzle’s key objective was to assemble in one system everything that the company needed to know about its customers, including:

• what products customers ordered
• customers’ browsing journey on the company’s website
• the communications sent to customers
• orders resulting from these activities.

With UniFida’s CDP, Wentworth Puzzles was able to take immediate control of the selection of customers for specific marketing campaigns. The complex process of targeting the right customers with the right message was enabled through 50 engineered data variables, including customer lifetime value and web browsing activity, created by UniFida within its CDP.

Initially, UniFida provided dashboards that showed the volumes of customers by RFM groups, as well as reports of sales being made to different customer groups. Charts were then created showing where orders came from and the value derived from existing customers versus new prospects. This was further broken down into how much value each annual cohort of customers provided.

Typically, Wentworth Puzzles obtain around 60% of its orders from existing customers, with the remaining 40% from new prospects, so a precise understanding of these numbers allowed the company to project forward in terms of the future value of its customer base.

The next step was to provide charts of the longer-term customer value derived from customers from different countries and from various recruitment channels and media. This information was used to align recruitment budget cost per acquisition to the expected return.

Most recently, UniFida has been able to deliver customer journey-based marketing attribution. This was achieved by collecting each online and offline activity in the 90 days before each order - for example, if a customer opened an email before using a Google PPC (Pay Per Click) link to find the company’s website.

UniFida then introduced AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology from its German partner Haensel AMS to provide a weighting for every customer journey step so that the value of orders could be accurately allocated to the campaigns and marketing activities that led up to each order. Wentworth Puzzles was therefore able to gain insights into the value of each campaign, as well as a higher level view of the return on marketing investment (ROMI) for each channel each month.

Key benefits

As a business that manufactures its own stock in advance of every campaign, accurate forecasting is key to forward planning and ensuring that the company optimises customer demand and experience.

In a year when everything changed for the company because of the global pandemic, from the patterns of customer demand to marketing activities, to have historical data was vital in helping Wentworth Puzzles to forecast 2021 demand.

Before working with UniFida, Wentworth Puzzles had around 39,000 active customers. By the start of 2022, its customer base showed a four-fold increase to 158,000. This exceptional growth was partly driven by the global pandemic, which forced people to find ways of occupying themselves when at home, but also by the customer communications and marketing analysis provided by UniFida’s CDP.

Sarah Watson, CEO, WWP said: “The developments that UniFida made to its customer data platform for us were life-changing, professionally speaking. To have real-time knowledge of which marketing activity is contributing to our sales, without relying on previous assumptions, meant that our long-time goal has been finally achieved. The ability to see easily which customer cohorts by year of acquisition are contributing to our sales - not just in 2020 but as far back as it is useful to know - has been a revelation.”

She added: “I am sure access to this new information will create more questions and inevitably lead to more enhancements. I am confident that UniFida will not only rise to the challenge, but also deliver much more than we expected.”

For further information visit www.unifida.co.uk