The Iberian distance selling leader uses Commanders Act to improve customer journeys, experiment with conversion tactics, and optimise acquisition spend.

A LEADER IN MULTICHANNEL DISTANCE SELLING

Venca is a leader in women’s fashion distance selling with a 60% market share in Spain and an important presence in Portugal. The brand is part of 3SI Group (formerly 3 Suisses International) and of Otto Group, the German e-commerce giant.

The company has over 25 years’ experience in distance selling and pioneered online sales from as early as 1996. Today, Venca is resolutely a multi-channel player.

In effect, although the brand still distributes 23 million physical catalogues per season, it also sends 50 million email messages to its customer base of 1.5 million contacts. It combines this effort with television advertisements and a host of online channels.

PUTTING DATA TO WORK

As a long-time proponent of CRM, Venca has always sought to get the most out of its data. However, the advent of the digital marketing era forced its marketing teams to adjust their approach.

“Today, online marketing is nothing without what we call attribution. Because our yard stick is acquisition performance, or CPA, we need to understand what our campaigns are really contributing,” explains Alexandrine Loubradou, Head of digital marketing at Venca.

Venca was already using an attribution solution to track its campaigns. However:

• • It didn’t offer the flexibility to measure a growing number of channels.
  • The brand wanted to obtain a true multichannel view and correlate its online metrics from those coming out of its CRM system.

GOING BEYOND LAST-CLICK ATTRIBUTION

Alexandrine Loubradou offers a sports analogy:
“The last click is like scoring a goal but let’s not forget the teamwork that got us there. The player that got possession of the ball, the player that passed it on…”

Although direct response methods have an important place in its marketing mix, Venca already benefits from significant brand recognition.

“For us, a last-click view would typically give credit to the email channel. However, it’s often a display campaign or a Facebook ad that yielded the address. Thus, when prospecting, the first click is very important and this partner should be recognised.”

DATA MODELS FOR DECISION MAKING

Venca uses data models as the basis for its decision making. With a complex marketing mix and a high degree of seasonality, a multitude of situations are possible. The brand thus requires great flexibility in setting up its data models.

“It’s very important for us to be able to create our own attribution models, to dig into the data and link it back to our online campaigns,” explains Alexandrine Loubradou. “That’s what we are doing today.”

Although CPA is central, the customer view remains primordial and Venca never loses sight of the relationships between channels: “By measuring their impacts better, we can balance how we invest across channels. We have even been able to reinvest brand content and above-the-line spending,” continues Alexandrine Loubradou.

RECONCILING ONLINE AND OFFLINE DATA TO OPTIMISE SPEND

It was fundamental to be able to yield reliable data and reports to better understand customer behaviour and the effective contribution of each channel.

“Today we have reliable data from both our catalogue and online operations. We are even getting a clearer vision of the impact of our TV campaign based on the time of broadcast,” says Alexandrine Loubradou. “But the real question is what to do with this insight: At Venca, we make hypotheses then we test them!”

Previously, Venca took a linear approach to online and offline channel spend. Today, with a holistic view, the brand can take decisions based on the timing of its ad campaigns and on customer segments. To achieve this, Venca uses filters in Commanders Act to test its hypotheses.

“Should we be doing more retargeting or CPC just after running a TV commercial? For this we can create a segment based on post-ad traffic and increase CPC spend and test it against a control group, for example. The results sometimes contradict our intuitions and this helps us avoid overinvesting.”

AN AGILE APPROACH TO ANALYTICS AND TAG MANAGEMENT

Venca is a great believer in agile methods. In this respect, the choice of Commanders Act was not an accident:

“Short cycles are ideally suited to our need to experiment whether it be trying out new attribution models or swapping out tags. Commanders Act was able to perform the initial implementation in 2 days; In less than a week, our marketing teams could start using the product. This afforded us better visibility of the overall project,” says Alexandrine Loubradou.

“Not only has tag management given us independence from the CIO, but choosing Commanders Act has also greatly simplified our relationships with our solution vendors. Likewise, Commanders Act’s customer success management approach has enabled us to go faster, especially at the implementation phase.”