Customer Lifecycle Campaign
At Gibbs & Dandy we pride ourselves on our customer-focussed strategy, which looks to ensure we are the most trusted builders’ merchant around. To help us achieve this goal, we wanted to make sure that our customers were happy with what we were doing and offering them. We wanted to talk to all our customers and this campaign focused on targeting those who had stopped trading with us – our lapsed and dormant accounts. We contacted these customers, asking them to provide feedback on why they were no longer buying from us and, in some cases, offering them incentives to restart trading – some hadn’t traded with us for over 2 years.
We called this activity our ‘Customer Lifecycle Campaign’ because it focussed on encouraging customers who had once been trading with us to come back – or at least to let us know why they had stopped trading; whether that was because they’d found a different preferred supplier, because we hadn’t dealt with a complaint properly or just because they weren’t buying from any merchant as regularly as they had previously.
By offering a range of incentives, from charity donations to site DAB radios and account credits to tablets, we wanted to see what would work the best for our customers. What we found surprised us – just the act of communication and asking what we could do better was enough for many customers to come back to Gibbs & Dandy. We did find that those customers who received both a direct mailer and an email responded slightly more than those with just a mailer – a 2% increase was noted in reactivation. This result means that, moving forward, we will always try to ensure a multi-touch approach in our marketing campaigns and customer communications.
Working with our marketing agency, WAA Chosen, we were able to send out eye-catching direct mailers with personalised messages for each offer. There were fourteen variations in total, so a huge effort was required to make sure these all looked good and got across a message that felt personal. We really liked the designs and our customers seemed to agree and respond too!
One of the incentive variations we are very proud of was the offer of a £2 donation to our charity partner, Macmillan Cancer Support. Either by reactivating their account or sending back their feedback cards, our customers have helped to raise £2,164 for this very worthwhile cause and we couldn’t be more pleased that we’ve been able to add this amount to the overall total raised for the year.
Being shortlisted in the Construction Marketing Awards 2015 was a great honour and going on to win the Best Mid-Range Budget Campaign has been a brilliant way to celebrate the success of the campaign, which has continued to show results by engaging with customers, increasing our live trading accounts and driving incremental sales. The win has been really encouraging for us moving forward, particularly as the campaign has now become a business-as-usual activity.
Author: Cherise Hardy, Gibbs & Dandy
