Women's Secret Drives Loyalty With CRM

Last year the lingerie brand Women's Secret had limited insight into the particular shopping behaviors and preferences of individual customers. As with many companies, much of the brand's marketing and planning was based on overall historical sales and intuition.

Competition being what it is, Women's Secret, which is owned by the large Madrid-based fashion retailer Grupo Cortefiel, realized it needed to offer its wide range of customers a more personalized experience. By learning more about each customer, the company could tempt her with specific offers that matched her spending profile, increasing loyalty, sales and the entire customer base at the same time.

Building a loyalty program
With this goal in mind, six months ago the company set out to develop a customer database and to create a loyalty program, dubbed the "Wonderclub," a.k.a. "Club WOW," says Belen Valiente, director of Club WOW. To put the loyalty club into motion, the company would need a customer relationship management (CRM) solution that would enable it to analyze and use the database efficiently.

Enter Teradata and its CRM solution. It was an easy decision, Valiente says. Grupo Cortefiel had first invested in Teradata's technology in 2004 to create an enterprise data warehouse to improve the quality, clarity and speed of information access across its enterprise. Now it was ready to generate a higher return on those data assets, and use them to better understand and serve individual customers.

As the use of its data warehouse progressed, Grupo Cortefiel integrated data in its centralized Teradata warehouse from across different marketing channels, while also introducing analytics, to better understand and manage customer transaction behavior. By the time Women's Secret was ready to implement its loyalty solution, Teradata's CRM solution was managing the rest of Grupo Cortefiel's brand loyalty clubs.4

And because of prior company experience with the solution, the implementation ran smoothly, says Valiente.

Women's Secret is using the CRM solution to analyze and optimize its customer communications. In the first four months since the launch of the system - in just its Seville and Murcia store locations - the brand tripled the number of subscribers to its loyalty program. With such positive results, the brand is working quickly to extend the solution to the rest of its Spain-based stores, says Valiente.

The marketing initiative, which is enabled by Teradata's CRM solution, allows customers to subscribe to the program without any commitment, and enjoy various club benefits and advantages.

What are those? Customers who join the club receive "wowmoney" - vouchers equaling 5 percent of their purchases - which they can use toward future purchases at Women's Secret for the subsequent year.

Additionally, loyalty club members receive a "birthday surprise" on their birthdays, along with other discounts and special offers. Club WOW also treats its members to free exclusive concerts, festivals and trips.

Teradata also allows the lingerie brand to launch timely, individualized promotions based on sophisticated CRM customer event triggers, she says.

"Teradata enables us to have an accurate customer profile. We know the frequency of purchases, as well as the buying average price," says Valiente.

Taking CRM to the next level
Still, the full power of the CRM system is far from being tapped at Women's Secret.
"This autumn, we'll start crossing this data with product information. We won't start to segment our database further until we have more registrations and more data detail, as we want to fine tune our campaigns," she says.

"For the time being, as we are building a more complete database; [we are not using the CRM solution to its full capacity]. Nevertheless, if we continue at the current speed, it will become a fundamental tool for the company's strategic decision making," says Valiente.

Up next, the company is working to set up different customer profiles as it gathers more data, so that it can design accurate and profitable marketing campaigns. Additionally, the company will soon be launching Club WOW in Portugal, and expects that to be highly successful.

Although she says it's too soon to talk about very specific results such as ROI or overall sales increases, Valiente notes that "figures are trending positively" and that average sales per club customer are higher than they are for those customers who are not members. Club WOW customers "are very sensitive to the campaigns," she says.

The solution is already producing measurable results, she says. "Teradata CRM is a strategic tool for our business, not only in terms of profitability but also in terms of image, service and customer satisfaction," she concludes.

Jordan K. Speer is senior editor of Apparel.