2021 Silver Best Use of Data and Insight

Agency: Havas CX helia

Client: Toolstation

Campaign Name: My Toolstation

Campaign Overview

Toolstation had an alternative channel to its much-loved catalogue that gave customers a superior experience and saved the brand money - but it wasn't being used.

The brand needed to coax customers to the website to experience its benefits and change their shopping behaviour.

Strategy

Toolstation was founded on its quarterly catalogue - a workman's bible in the form of a metaphorical brick.

After thumbing through 17,000 products in 21 departments over 800 pages, customers either had to go to a store or head online - possibly to discover an item was out of stock.

Something better was needed.

Toolstation had a website where customers could not only find the products they needed at the click of a button, but check on stock availability and delivery options, and refer to saved searches.

But it wasn't being used while customers automatically reached for the catalogue.

Customers would need to be coaxed into experiencing the site. Counter-intuitively, the best way to do this would be by relying on their muscle memory, using paper as the means to encourage them from paper, to online.

A fast, highly relevant and sparky communication was needed to spur customers into actio

Creativity

The brand needed something to connect on- and offline worlds seamlessly, fast and cost-efficiently. With QR codes becoming common currency, it had the means, delivered via a mailpack.

Delivering hyper-relevancy required behavioural insight and clear audience strategy.

The approach in summary:

• Identify trade from consumer customers - matched data with third-party source of UK businesses, enriching with industry sector to identify product propensity

• Propensity to buy across channels - use of K-Means clustering to create a set of derived variables, including store proximity, channel, time and day of purchase, products and brands

• Product recommendation - analysed transactions from 9m customers, across 20,000 products in 21 categories, identifying six core categories per customer, resulting in 143,000 iterations of the codes (50+% receiving codes unique to them)

Designers used the insights to turn QR pixels into a set of personalised product icons, creating their own Toolstation store on the move, with at-a-glance accessibility.

Applied to heavy-duty stickers these codes could be attached to the places closest to hand during the working day, like a toolbox, workbench or dashboard

Results

Customers liked being given shortcuts to what they wanted to buy: targets were smashed by 300%. Incremental traffic to the website went up by 10% as customers ditched their catalogues to go online.

They shopped more 9% more frequently, and average order values went up by 5%. Toolstation also enjoyed 14% more revenue per customer.

The four-page mailpack cost just a quarter of the catalogue - and data scientists uncovered and removed 6.5% of customers who were getting multiple copies.

All of this resulted in an annualised saving just short of £1m, a loss-making communication turned into a profitable one with an ROI of 3:1

The Team

Havas CX helia - Carly Martell, Strategy Director - Tim Waskett, Senior Data Consultant - David Thomas, Head of Analysis - Rachel Heathfield, Senior Copywriter - Libby Clay, Senior Art Director - Natalie Hilliger, Head of Copy - Charlie Ryder, Business Director - Nick Hurst, Senior Account Director - Geeta Bhandari, Senior Producer - Kat Polley, Programme Director - Simon Baker, Digital Design Director - Matt Palmer, Design Director

Toolstation - Chris Maggs, CRM Manager - Gary Edwards, Direct Marketing Campaign Manager - Kyle Kenny, Direct Marketing Campaign Manager - Stuart Mcgrogan, Head of Architecture

Contributors

delivr and TaskerStone