2015 Gold Best Customer Journey

WDMP

Wyevale Garden Centres

Wyevale Garden Centres - Customer Journey

The Team

Campaign overview

Despite amassing more than three million members The Garden Club, the loyalty club of Wyevale Garden Centres (WGC), was not used to unlock sufficient value or insight.

This campaign overhauled the customer journey to increase average spend, repeat purchases and loyalty. It took a latent marketing asset, turned it into a key revenue driver at the heart of WGC’s business and more than doubled its target ROI.

Strategy

The previous loyalty programme used purely transactional based targeting, so the team enhanced this with lifestyle and geodemographic segmentation to identify three clear audience segments. This enabled targeted and relevant communications that increased incremental sales.

‘Leisure and discovery gardeners’ included members who are just starting out on their gardening journey. ‘Focused favourites’ are those with clear gardening passion points. ‘Committed gardeners’ are experts.

WGC created The Great British Garden Survey, gaining a huge amount of quantitative and qualitative data that revealed deep market insight as well as gardeners’ habits and their next projects. This generated unique creative territory to own and PR as well as understanding of the motivations of each membership segment that could be put into action. This informed all customer touchpoints and identified new channels with untapped creative opportunities.

Creativity

A ‘more to love’ creative approach understood that Garden Club members wanted to be educated and inspired, not simply sold to. WGC changed from a catalogue approach and sent highly targeted communications that offered content aligned to customer passions.

Member communications were divided into three distinct phases: Welcome, Nurture and Grow.

The welcome process for new members introduced the scheme’s benefits and incentivised future visits and purchase using content inspired by the survey.

A new tailored monthly newsletter delivered advice and tips to educate and enthuse members, not just sell to them, and to nurture their projects and loyalty.

Further targeted promotions aligned to specific segments, based on their propensity to purchase, designed to grow sales.

Results

The Great British Garden Survey received more than 80,000 responses, making it the nation’s largest garden survey. It delivered 4,000 new members to The Garden Club. It also collected 40,000 gardening tips from members – an invaluable new content resource.

More than 32,000 new customers came through WGC’s welcome programme, with email open rates above 38% and a 50% increase in repeat visitor rate. Through email, more than £22 additional sales have been generated per member per year, across WGC’s 980,000-customer eCRM programme.

Direct mail results exceeded the incremental sales target by 295% and delivered a huge 597% ROI, while the overall campaign produced a 209% ROI.