Getting Personal uses engagement segmentation to improve year on year revenue by 51%

The challenge

Due to email marketing being such a cost effective channel, in the past it was easy for us to just email everyone and hope for the best. When RedEye introduced us to engagement segmentation it was a slightly nerve racking prospect as it involved cutting down the amount of people we mailed. However it couldn’t have worked out better for us. By segmenting our data based on RFM and email engagement, we have been able to focus on our most valuable customers, and use a re-engagement programme to target non engaging customers. Not only has this greatly improved our deliverability and open rates, but we have also seen a great improvement in online revenue.

- Email Marketing Manager
Getting Personal

 

 

 

 

As an online retailer, email is a key channel for driving revenue. However untargeted mass mailings had led to deliverability issues. The company had become blocked by several ISPs and many email campaigns were ending up in junk.

Getting Personal needed to implement a new email marketing strategy to improve their reputation as an email sender, improve deliverability, improve user engagement and ultimately improve online revenue.

Solution

As poor deliverability and poor campaign performance are strongly linked to targeting issues, RedEye proposed Getting Personal implement a highly targeted approach based on engagement segmentation. Sending emails to people who want to receive them is vital for successful email marketing. By segmenting customers by engagement based on RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) Getting Personal could decide who needed to receive regular mailings and who should be targeted with a re-engagement programme.

To begin the process RedEye analysed the email marketing data used by Getting Personal. The first stage of the analysis was to segment the Getting Personal customer data into RFM segments. 125 segments were created based on online RFM activity. Each of the measurement metrics were divided equally into 5 segments, with the highest values being in the number 5 segment, and the lowest being in the number one segment.

Following this RedEye helped Getting Personal analyse the email engagement status of each RFM segment. For example the recency of action (open or click) on an email.

These two types of segmentation (online and email) were then overlaid on each other.

Based on this analysis an email strategy was devised, ensuring the most engaged customers received emails more frequently than less engaged customers. The less engaged customers were targeted with a specific programme to promote re-engagement and analysis.

Results

The engagement segmentation strategy enabled Getting Personal to come up with a frequency methodology to ensure the most engaged customers received emails most frequently as opposed to using a blanket approach.

The results were as follows:

• Revenue from email increased 51% compared to the previous year.
• Open rates reached 40%.
• Click rates reached 10%.
• The numbers of emails sent doubled from 7 million to 15 million.
• Deliverability reached 99% across all segments.
• The number of highly engaged users increased by 10% per month from July-December 2010.
• Over 100,000 customers migrated back from non-engaged segments.

RedEye continues to assist Getting Personal in the development of their segmentation strategy, driving more revenue through email.