By Andrea Lane
Marketing Strategist
August 2017

Winning campaigns: 10 must do’s for success

“It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.” – Steve Jobs

As a retailer we know how critical your marketing campaigns can be. How much time is spent crafting the ideal campaign to engage your customer, grow market share or simply shift stock and increase sales? As a customer, how many marketing emails do you receive in a given day? 5? 10? 20? No matter your perspective, retailer or customer – time is precious. Retailers need campaigns that achieve their commercial goals. Customers want messages that are relevant to them and personal. What’s a marketer to do? Our marketing strategist, Andrea Lane shares her Top 10 tips to run a successful campaign.

1. Be clear on the campaign objective. Driving sales volume or margin? Shifting sale stock or maximising full price sales? Different objectives and challenges will call for different approaches and offer types. Be clear on what your campaign needs to achieve.

2. Support the wider promotional calendar. How does this campaign message fit into your overall marketing plan? It’s important you have a cohesive message and that individual campaigns throughout the year support the wider promotional calendar. Have you considered time of year, customer profiles and previous campaign data? Be sure it all ties in.

3. Determine the optimum threshold for spend-value led campaigns. If your objective is to stretch spend, what’s a realistic stretch for your customer? Does this differ by channel? Will a ‘one size fits all’ approach work? Set the spend threshold too high and response rate may be low – set the spend threshold too low and have a missed commercial opportunity. Find your sweet spot.

4. Target to maximise take-up. Use what you know about your customer to tailor the offer and messaging. If your customer only ever spends £30 with you then the offer of £10 off when spending £100 is probably too much of an ask. RFV (recency, frequency, value) Modelling and off-the-shelf customer profiling solutions can also offer enhanced targeting opportunities.

5. Time it right. ‘Flash offer’ or a longer duration? Most sales will come in the first 1-3 days of campaign with subsequent peaks on Saturdays. Consider reminder tactics mid-campaign for offers lasting longer than 10 days.

6. Consider the breadth of appeal. A campaign that is usable across departments will normally deliver stronger results than an offer that is limited to a specific product range. That said, range-led offers can work well as a hook for driving footfall and then wider spend. As part of your analysis, be sure to look at the customer’s overall spend for these type of campaigns.

7. Utilise all available customer touch points. From in-store POS to web exposure and customer service teams. Always make sure in-store staff are fully briefed. Invite feedback from them too – they will be able to give you first-hand knowledge of how well a campaign has performed and why. Your store team is best-placed for offering up plenty of other campaign ideas too.

8. Customer accessibility and ease of use. Can the offer be accessed through all channels? Featuring an offer on a specific range that is only available in selected stores will only serve to disappoint.

9. Integrate your communication approach. Improve response rates by combining SMS, email and direct mail. This approach has increased response rates by up to 7% for some of our retail partners.

10. Test and re-test offers. When analysing your campaign, consider results in light of wider business performance. A poor campaign result at face-value might be more a reflection of overall trading conditions or stock problems. An exceptionally strong result may be as much down to the strength of the product offering as to the offer itself.  Testing offers and different times of the year and under different circumstances will give a more robust understanding of how your campaign performed and how it is likely to perform if ran again in future.

At Ikano Bank, we have an in house team of ‘data geeks’ dedicated to our retail partners. We help you understand your customers, make the most of the data a retail finance solution will create, and guide you through intelligent, data-driven decisions to grow your business.

Get in touch @ www.ikano.co.uk/retail-finance/contact-us