The Entertainer Amplifies its Single Customer View

One of Europe’s largest toy retailers, The Entertainer, has been targeting the single customer view, and seeing results. The retailer reports a three-time increase in email revenue and a 97% rise in YOY sales to date, just 18 months after it chose SmartFocus’ digital marketing platform.

The UK’s largest high street toy retailer has 138 stores, operating for over 35 years. Its e-commerce site,  thetoyshop.com, has been running since 1999.

"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," said Rob Wood, Head of Online at The Entertainer. "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."

To achieve this, The Entertainer turned to SmartFocus's The Message Cloud.

"We were looking for a world-class digital marketing platform that would let us personalize, segment and achieve a single view of our customers," said Rob Wood, Head of Online at The Entertainer. "We needed to make the complex ‘simple’ in order to interrogate our customer data from across all online channels, to understand who our customers are, how often they shop with us, what kind of products they liked and their lifetime value."

Using The Message Cloud, SmartFocus customers have rich data, intelligence and tools for sending contextually unique engagements, through?any digital channel. SmartFocus’s Message Cloud platform listens to and learns from its customers.

"The insights it provides drives our business strategy and allows us to understand our customers and connect with them in real-time - whether by email, mobile, web or social channels," said Wood. "It has given us a single customer view to power smarter emails tailored for specific personas. We can now send contextualized, real-time messages relevant to everyone."

Once The Entertainer migrated all of its transactional and marketing campaign programs to SmartFocus’s Message Cloud it enabled them to send 100% personalized and fully responsive messages to customers that were driven by their behavior, rather than by a best guess.

"We’re driving forward our ability to deliver a personalized service across all of our consumers and touch points. The work we’re doing with SmartFocus gives us the ability to really drill down to individual purchase patterns and talk to people with far more relevance. That’s what we’re hoping to achieve."

Wood and Phil Geary, Dir., Marketing and Ecommerce, The Entertainer, will reveal how real-time marketing and personalization can influence customer purchase at NRF 2017 in the session "Context. Content. Crowds. The Power Triangle of Modern Real-Time Marketing" on Monday, January 16 at 12.45.

For more on NRF 2017 be sure to check out RIS’ preview guide here.