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The Entertainer sees mobile sales rise 120% on the back of personalisation marketing

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The Entertainer, the fastest growing high street toy retailer in the UK, is reporting a threefold increase in email revenue and a 120% rise in mobile sales, off the back of digital marketing and personalization.

12 months ago, the toy retailer chose SmartFocus digital marketing and personalisation platform The Message Cloud, which has enabled the retailer to achieve astounding improvements in its results by implementing personalisation and segmentation, and achieving a single view of their customers.

This single customer view has been used to power smarter emails tailored for specific personas. These drive contextualized, real-time messages relevant to each individual – which has hidden complexities as the consumer (the child) is not the buyer (the adult). Using advanced algorithms to address the complex buyer personas has enabled astonishing increases in their results.

Rob Wood, Head of Online at The Entertainer explains: “We tripled our email revenue last year compared to the year before, which is a brilliant result for us and something we are really happy with. We’ve used the same database – it’s not like we have massively grown the database. All we have done is send better messages to the same people and got a better result from that.”

SmartFocus provides contextually relevant and unique engagements across The Entertainer’s digital channels and website, extending their existing hybris ecommerce platform with advanced omnichannel capability.

Within one year of using The Message Cloud, The Entertainer has:

  • Tripled email revenue

  • Doubled email open rates

  • Increased conversion rates

  • Seen a 44% increase in click-through rates

  • Seen a 120% increase in mobile sales

  • Seen a 60% increase in returning shoppers

  • Significantly increased average value orders (AOV)



Wood continues: “There is so much noise for potential customers, and emails are getting increasingly competitive. This means you only get one chance at your email, so it needs to be smarter and work harder.

“The information you used to set up your email two days ago might not be the best information when the email is opened,” he says. “If you know customers aren’t going to look at every single one of your emails, you need to offer them the very best message when they do choose to interact with your brand.”

Using the Message Cloud, The Entertainer is now able to self-serve and modify its personalisation algorithms in accordance with their business needs.

The Entertainer is the UK’s largest high street toy retailer with 120 stores and www.thetoyshop.com ecommerce site. The business has been operating for over 35 years and currently opens one new store per week, with their ecommerce site running since 1999.

Phil Geary, Chief Marketing Officer for the Entertainer, adds: “We are experts in what children love, and our winning combination of fair prices and excellent customer service, means we’re a favourite with mums and dads too. I’m delighted that we can ensure that our proud tradition continues online and across all of our marketing channels, by partnering with SmartFocus.

“SmartFocus helps to make our customer experience be the best it can be, irrespective of what channel we’re using, and the SmartFocus Message Cloud ensures that my team and I can offer perfect user experience every time. Replicating our in-store experience when each and every one of our customers visits our website or receives one of our marketing messages is critical to us. The SmartFocus solution offered us all of the capabilities we needed in a single, comprehensive platform.”

“Consumers are connecting with brands via multiple channels, which means retailers must do more to drive customer loyalty,” says Rob Mullen, CEO of SmartFocus. “With sophisticated analytics at the heart of our solution, the team at The Entertainer can harness actionable insights from multiple data customer channels to create engaging and relevant conversations no matter the channel. We’re extremely proud to be their marketing technology partner.”

Personalisation is very much the watchword for today’s omni and multichannel retailer and was one of the main themes at this year’s IRX16 event. The Entertainer joins a growing band of retailers who are seeing the results of investing in personalisation. JD Williams turned to personalisation platform provider Monetate to create personalised experiences for visitors using mobile and tablet devices. The JD Wiliams team were able to quickly build, test and implement a bespoke mobile experience which generated an uplift of 18% in new visitor conversion within the space of two weeks – demonstrating the value of personalisation to the business.

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