2011 Silver Retail

Client HMV

What is wonderful about this work? A multi-channel engagement programme to deliver new capability, designed to strategically drive engagement with millions of online customers and loyalty cardholders, using precision 1-2-1 eCRM, email and DM. Activity has driven 16% incremental revenue and ROI of over 600%.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? HMV is in a tough market. The decline of traditional entertainment formats requires radical changes within a business that has not previously used advanced DR techniques. This is a major multi-channel DR drive to engage, retain and drive revenue from both retail and online buyers of music, DVDs, games, digital downloads and gig tickets (including two million purehmv loyalty cardholders). The objective was to tackle changing customer purchase behaviours, changing entertainment formats, retail product mix and channels of distribution. With declining retail sales for music and DVDs as customers migrate to digital, HMV had little internal capability for data-led DM. There were many legacy data structures, including the purehmv loyalty card, HMV.com, HMV Digital, HMV Tickets and a mass volume ESP provider, but no cohesive data strategy. Data management was not a core skill within the business. Our developments have given fresh success to DR activity.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? We completely redesigned the look of their DR collateral, with changes driven by the availability of 1-2-1 precision personalised data. Marketing segmentation and deployment has been transformed from a high volume spray-and-pray ESP approach, with regular highly-targeted engagementgenerating emails, real-time triggered behavioural follow-ups, NPS and loyalty redemption triggers and purehmv retail support programmes. These combine for marketing effectiveness in email and DM, driving revenue for thousands of product variations in a very fast-paced, price-conscious industry. Using historical transactional data we have created personalised entertainment collections for each customer, identifying key buyer behaviours across each format to inform offer and content strategies.

Results The initiative has saved HMV £150,000 and unlocked over three million customers who were previously not being marketed to. New insight and data capability has unlocked an estimated four million annual cross-selling opportunities. Results are driven by intelligent cross-selling and migration of product mix using data planning schedules and triggered 1-2-1 email and DM. We have also provided significant modelling results to tackle customer lapsing and protect high-value repurchasing and cross-selling. The email and DM activity has delivered over 1.4m transactions, with 16% incremental revenue. Break-even ROI profitability was achieved within six months.

Team Mark Brennan, Matt Button, Lisa Davidson, Jenna Gugich, Jim Nicholson, Leigh Brady, Nathan Sukkar, Kerry Levere, Mo Van Praag.