By Elliott Clayton, Managing Director International Sales, Epsilon
The old saying “you can’t improve what you can’t measure” was surely coined with ecommerce marketing in mind. Marketers who can accurately measure the effectiveness of their campaigns enjoy a distinct advantage because they can identify where to direct their resources for maximum impact. But sadly, marketing measurement is not that easy.
Ecommerce may be awash with data, but the big challenge is separating the wheat from the chaff – tracking individual customers (rather than cookies on devices) as they progress through the sales pipeline and measuring killer metrics such as incremental growth and multi-touch attribution.
In February 2020, UK-based fashion retailer PrettyLittleThing (PLT) showed the industry how it’s done, partnering with Epsilon to optimise its marketing measurement and achieve game-changing business insights. PLT was so successful that it managed to buck pandemic trends and reported an annual revenue increase of 38% in 2020.
Kristy Hynes, PLT’s paid media manager, says: “There’s an industry joke that says the person who can solve the challenge of multi-touch attribution and keep every channel owner happy, will be very rich indeed. Well, Epsilon gets it very close, if not hits it on the head.”
A business intelligence teams’ dream
At the heart of Epsilon’s solution is transparency and collaboration, which Hynes describes as “a business intelligence team’s dream”.
“A lot of people talk about incremental measurement, but there’s a right and wrong way of doing it.” Says Hynes. “The choice is between an assumptive method with a high margin of error or a scientific model that gives an exact, verifiable figure that can drive effective marketing investment.”
Accurate measurement can get complicated very quickly, however, and it takes a lot of time to do it right. Many of Epsilon’s competitors take hours, even days, to build and rebuild audiences for digital messaging; whereas our consumer profiles are updated in real-time to help inform the next best message for the consumer, which leads to the best outcome for each brand.
Hynes says: “We don’t just know what our customers are doing within the measurement of a single platform, we can map their movement cross-channel and adapt our communication to where they are in their journey and show them products reflective of their personal styles. This creates relevant experiences for the consumer and provides us with cost-efficient growth.”
This new level of measurement has enabled PLT to start planning and optimising marketing spend to consumers and share messages that will drive the highest incremental return. It has also enabled the brand to leverage messaging that is less insistent but more consistent – higher quality advertising that is more relevant and more creative.
Targeting high-value customers and optimising marketing spend
Accurate customer insights now reveal how much PLT should spend at every stage of the funnel, avoiding customers who are going to buy anyway and spending the optimal amount to convert people close to purchase. Meanwhile, PLT can use the savings from customers who will buy anyway to invert the sales funnel and target customers who will buy again.
PLT now has sufficient accurate data to identify high-value first-time buyers who drive maximum return on marketing spend. This enables the company to acquire new customers profitably and at volume using media across the open web.
Hynes says that Epsilon’s transparent measurement process had been key to their recent success. She says: “Our Business Insights team can check the distribution of those samples and validate the raw data so that we have complete transparency and the confidence to invest.
“It’s a level of transparency that you simply can’t get elsewhere and means we can be very agile in putting our marketing strategies together.”
