Automated data-driven personalisation, at every stage of the customer lifecycle with over 55 personalised campaigns

At a glance

• Data-driven decision making

• Seven figure revenues with limited human intervention

• Hyper-personalisation

• 17% increase in revenue from a predictive engagement model

Download case study

Introducing MandM Direct

MandM Direct were established in 1987 by founders Mark Ellis and Martin Churchward, selling end of line sports products directly to consumers in the UK. Now more than 30 years on, MandM Direct are one of Europe’s leading online off-price retailers selling fashionable on-trend styles, to sportswear essentials.

Growing their active audience

With over 2.5 million active customers – and growing – MandM Direct realised they were struggling to identify where all their customers were in the customer lifecycle.

Mainly due to numerous disparate and siloed data sets, as well as internal teams using multiple platforms for customer communications.

Not only did this cause challenges for data accuracy, maintenance and reporting – but this was causing a strain on the Marketing team through the amount of resources and time it took to learn how to use different systems.

Ultimately this meant they could not easily, or accurately, tailor relevant messages to their customers based on what they knew about them.

MandM Direct realised in order to improve retention and gain even more value from their vast customer database, they needed to stop sending the same messages to all customers and start delivering truly personalised experiences that would engage, convert and retain their customer base.

When the UK was forced into lockdown in March 2020 schools, colleges, and universities, along with non-essential retailers, were told to close for the foreseeable future. Empty classrooms and deserted high streets were about to result in e-commerce traders seeing some of the biggest growth in sales and revenue outside of peak.

"The flexibility and versatility of the RedEye teams and approach has meant that we’ve been able to join our own cloud-based customer data solutions directly into the platform - this is now powering personalisation in every email that we send." Matthew Grisman, Head of Customer Retention, MandM Direct

Drawing intelligent insights from structured and actionable data

The first stage was to help MandM Direct attain a single source of truth for their customer data. They used this to draw intelligent insights to drive decision making around what automated lifecycle campaigns and what advanced segmentation they could implement.

RedEye helped consolidate data sources from personal information to onsite behaviour, through to channel engagement and transactional data, all fully integrated into a single unified view.

This enabled MandM Direct to have the confidence that the data they were using was accurate and up to date to power those all-important personalised messages.

But that’s not all...

RedEye’s integration platform provided a simple and fast way to build a connection from MandM Direct’s own cloud-based solution, pulling valuable data sources such as most purchased brands or products, enabling MandM Direct to individually personalise to each customer.

Driving hyper-personalised automated interactions

Being able to query, understand and then action their newly uncovered customer segments through automated campaigns – all in one place – allowed MandM Direct to become more sophisticated with their marketing automation.

This was achieved by using accurate customer data to personalise specific content areas within their campaigns.

A single email was uniquely personalised for each individual depending on detailed values such as their behaviour, stage of their lifecycle or previous interactions.

This allowed MandM Direct to target diverse groups of customers, with one single campaign, but ensure the messaging was truly relevant to them.

Not only did this improve the customers experience with MandM Direct, showing them content most likely to appeal to them increased the level of engagement they received from their customers, along with conversions.

Displaying accurate information based on what MandM Direct know about their customers

1. Acknowledging the customers stage of the lifecycle and personalising content that would acknowledge that.

2. Showing accurate and relevant information based on what MandM Direct knew about their customers preferences.

3. MandM Direct dynamically contextualised the content to make it relevant to their customers.

Introducing frequency optimisation to drive further value

Like many retailers, MandM Direct had previously focused on assuming volume would drive results, however they soon realised that wasn’t the most suitable approach to drive the most value.

RedEye’s predictive engagement model provided never seen before insights into the level of engagement within their customer database, meaning MandM Direct could make informed decisions around frequency management.

This enabled them to be more efficient and effective with their messaging and volumes by targeting their more engaged customers regularly resulting in a 17% increase in revenue from only 2% increase in volume.

“Being able to segment our email base by level of engagement has led to a more focused management of send volume.

In practice this has meant sending more to our top engaged customers (alphas) and the confidence to curtail sends to our non-engaged almost completely.

This led to a 17% increase in email revenue for only 2% more volume YoY.”

Matthew Grisman, Head of Customer Retention
MandM Direct

Continuous support from a dedicated team

The perfect blend of RedEye’s tech and people enabled MandM Direct to achieve fantastic results driving towards greater customer retention and loyalty.

Not only were they on hand to help MandM Direct make the most of the platform, the dedicated RedEye team provided strategic workshops and support to help them fully understand the value and insights of their data across the customer lifecycle, providing advice on automation strategies to make the most out of personalised journeys.

This ongoing expert support and ideas, such as adding agile content into their email creatives, allows MandM Direct to continually finesse and improve the effectiveness of their creatives and campaigns, all with the aim to engage, convert and retain their valuable customer database.

55 personalised campaigns, 7 countries, 7 figure revenue

The scale in which MandM Direct were able to grow was made effortless – from one single automated abandoned basket campaign, to now having over 55 personalised automated campaigns across 7 countries, in just 18 months.

This improved the effectiveness of their Marketing team, who no longer had to rely on resource intensive data analysis, crossover between multiple systems and complicated systems to implement any campaign.

RedEye campaigns were intelligent enough to run automatically, enabling the marketing team to return their focus onto strategic tasks; whilst the data driven automation produced seven figures plus in revenue…

“My team found the campaign management and segmentation tools so user friendly they could scale up their triggered messaging programmes such as abandoned basket, browse and search, plus our nursery/welcome programmes across 7 countries.

These automated campaigns brought in over £3 million of revenue last year alone.”