The context
20 brands of clothing, footwear and accessories recognized in LATAM.
The leading retail company with more than 40 years of presence in the market and with 529 stores in Chile, Peru, Colombia and Uruguay.
Do you know FORUS? Luciano Panetta is its Head of Digital Channels and is in charge of planning, directing and managing the dynamics of the company's digital sales strategy. Working with his team are brands such as Under Armour, MANGO, Hush Puppies, Columbia Sportswear Company, Merrell, Caterpillar Inc., Rockford and Pasqualini. Every brand has its own customers, it tells its own story.
This company seeks to contribute to people's happiness, inspiring them to live in a healthier, more active and sustainable way, at every moment of their lives.
A few years ago, the company decided to define itself as Consumer Fanatic, a flag to which today they do total justice. But to get there, there was a path to travel, in which the customer had to be the total center of the strategy.
How was it achieved? We'll tell you!
The challenge
FORUS' strategy to increase sales in its eCommerce used to be product-centric.
At each commercial event, the focus was on customer acquisition around the most chosen products, making a large investment in Paid Media and organic campaigns on their social networks.
To begin shifting the focus to a customer-centric approach, Luciano and his team set out to gain an in-depth understanding of the distribution of their customer base and, therefore, the health of the business.
Their main objective was to understand their buyers based on the most relevant KPIs for the brand.
Thanks to the cross-referencing of this data with the frequency of purchases, FORUS found itself with the information that would completely change the rules of the game.
In their customer base, 78% of them had purchased only once. These people are worth much less as customers compared to those who bought at least a second time, not to mention those who can be considered frequent. (bought 3 times or more).
This 78% had a 7.4% worse recency than the rest and their future value was 54% lower, but they represent more than 60% of revenues. Knowing this fact, they found a great opportunity to activate those customers and motivate them to buy a second time. Since, the indicators change in a big way when a buyer returns for their second purchase. The future value doubles, the recency drops by 20%, the cart stays the same, and the average ticket goes up.
We all hear the phrase that it's cheaper to acquire a customer who has already bought from you than a new one. But once you see it with your own eyes and find there a real opportunity for growth and customer loyalty, it's a different story.
Here is the power of having your customer portfolio segmented and in turn, the value of the relationship in the long term; We are accompanying the client in all its stages.
So where do I need to put my efforts today? Luciano Panetta wondered. Acquiring a new customer or activating one that already has their information?
The strategy
The incorporation of Data4Sales into the FORUS strategy changed the day-to-day life of the team.
Today, Luciano and his colleagues brainstorm once a week, seeing on the platform what can be attacked and setting objectives based on the insights taken. This is a huge guide for the business.
But having clear information about your buyer base is a big responsibility.
When you carry out a customer-centric strategy, you have to make decisions based on metrics such as Lifetime Value, purchase frequency, churn rate, activity rate, among others.
This means fully understanding your customers, their behavior and motivations, in order to work from them.
This information led Luciano to start thinking from his customers outwards: If I have to sell $1,000,000, how many customers do I make it up with? How many do I have to allow myself to give up and how many do I have to recover?
This task is simpler than it seems, and what you are looking for as your ultimate goal is profitability.
FORUS began its strategy knowing that it had two major issues resolved, first, it had a real knowledge of the distribution of its base and, on the other hand, it was clear from which channels it was going to communicate to carry out the different stages of its process.
Paid Media is the king of acquisition, in the case of FORUS the work was with META. It has a high cost, and you have to invest them in the best way so that the customer who comes behaves better than the average.
Hand in hand with Data4Sales, FORUS' strategy was, with the audience of its 5000 best customers, to impact through a "Lookalike". The goal was clear: to find people with the same characteristics as their customers with the highest LifeTime Value.
Then, the investment would be highly profitable, since the chances are very high that this group of people will decide to stay as a customer of the brand.
When it comes to developing customers, their main channels are Email Marketing and PUSH notifications. Once you've acquired customers, you have to work to ensure that they don't abandon you. With a constant connection, telling stories and offering discounts or other relevant actions for the buyer.
At this point, intelligent segmentation is absolutely key to avoid sending the same emails to the entire database and avoid unsubscribing derived from emails sent to people they are not interested in. The magic is hand in hand with the small bases, with people who are really predisposed to receive emails from your brand, since they know that there they will find content that matters.
"If we know which customers to tell each story to, we're going to do better and better."
For customer recovery, WhatsApp is direct and effective, always using small, direct and super specific databases.
Each audience has its own needs. From Data4Sales, you can understand the behavior and motivations, in this way, you tell the right story to each person, taking advantage of what matters and challenges them and the way in which it is best to reach them.
A CYBER MONDAY with a customer-based strategy
FORUS faced its real challenge in 2023: CYBER MONDAY. One of the most important discount dates in Uruguay. Luciano's team, with a 100% customer-focused strategy and detailed information on its basis, decided to carry out a customer reactivation process.
How did he do it?
"Great things can be done with Data4Sales, any business has an interesting portfolio of inassets to recover and it's very simple to do."
The most valuable inactive customers in the business were chosen, as they were found to be a great asset to capitalize on. These are people who haven't bought for a while, but whose future value in the next 12 months is high. From these, a small base was selected to begin the process.
Among the communication channels most used by FORUS, is WhatsApp, as we mentioned before, this platform is widely used by the company as an ally when it comes to reactivating buyers.
Why? Because it is a tool that provides intimacy, trust and that should be used with certain types of buyers. In addition, it ensures a really very high delivery, open, and conversion rate compared to others. Considering the future value of the selected customer group, they knew that this channel was going to be a huge advantage.
In the middle of the event, an attractive discount campaign was sent to these people.
The results
There is a wide difference between the results of the reactivation in 2022 and 2023. Both in the months where there were no commercial dates of discounts, and during the month of June, in which the strategy in question was carried out.