Cox & Cox generate £2M in incremental revenue by personalising display ads

“All across the board - the results, the account management, the insight, I just thought: why haven't we done this before?"

— Richard Bell, COO for Cox and Cox

The Challenge

“We’d been treating prospects and customers the same," Richard Bell, COO for Cox and Cox says, describing their previous marketing set-up. "We lacked any level of relevance or personalisation, other than how recent the customers’ site visit was."

"The big challenge for the homewares market is retention and increasing frequency of purchase. Anything we can do to improve that and reduce the reliance on acquisition will make us more profitable and help us to grow."

Jacqui Whitewick, Cox and Cox's head of acquisition continues: "We’re very much results driven with an eye on the brand, and at the end of the day we’re here to deliver sales – increase sales and increase the customer database both in terms of size and performance. We needed a flexible partner focused on driving our business goals."

The Solution

Conversant recommended a three-month proof of concept, starting out by creating a single customer view using Cox and Cox’s transaction data and Conversant's network of pseudonymous customer IDs. This single customer view would then be used to deliver personalised digital display media to prospects and customers based on their product affinity as individuals.

To measure success during the proof of concept stage, clear goals were set: to create profitable acquisition of new customers; get to second purchase on customers by understanding their product affinity; generating a profitable incremental return across all of Conversant's activity for Cox and Cox.

Understanding the brand’s customer data would further provide unique insight to drive business objectives outside of the display channel, while the display channel itself - and Conversant's work - would generate new profit, allowing Cox and Cox to invest in business growth.

THE RESULTS

“The numbers in the forecast were real, the proof of concept did what it was supposed to, we saw an immediate business impact, and it was completely painless to set up,” explains Richard Bell. “All across the board – the results, the account management, the insight, I just thought: why haven’t we done this before?

“We ran the activity as a head-to-head comparison with another provider, and Conversant blew it out of the water. There was no comparison in terms of the performance or insight that Conversant generated.

"Conversant's results got us to where we wanted to be much quicker, while the insight and direction we were getting was far better - It was an easy decision to change.

"The most effective feature is around the understanding and delivery of product affinity and category recommendations. It’s clear the more relevant and personalised we can make it for our customers, the better we’re going to do."

"We make positive ROI on customer acquisition with Conversant," says Jacqui Whitewick. "And we’ve seen the difference in the performance of the existing customer work we do. It’s an entirely separate stream now to acquisition – we are talking one-to-one with our customers.”

Performance

£2,088,462 Incremental revenue

23,769 New customers

12,690 Unique display creatives

"Genuinely, the account management we get has been superb. They listen, and it’s always focused on what we want to achieve and how they can help us. They tell us in detail what is happening with our business, why it is happening, and how to make the activity sing – that’s the bit I love, it’s not just commentary. It’s a proper partnership focussed on driving our business goals rather than soft metrics. I can’t speak highly enough."

— Richard Bell, COO, Cox and Cox

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