Ep.5/ HOW FATFACE MaximisED first party Data to drive profitability
One of my favourite suppliers invited me to talk at etail connect to talk about how utilising first party data really changed the game for fatface, if you were to look at the results of fatfaces 2023 you’d know there was more than just some smart marketing going on but after some reflection I can’t underestimate what a difference FIRST PARTY DATA can make when it comes to MARKETING PROFITABILITY.
READ MORE
2023 was a transformative year for FatFace, when I joined it was challenging retail environment (when is it not nowadays) but FatFace bucked the trend achieving triple profits, won accolades such as "Best Retailer under £500m" and "Marketing Game Changer," and was acquired by retail giant NEXT for £115 million. This remarkable success was driven by a few factors, investment, store portfolio, option growth, but not forgetting the brands utilisation use of first-party data and a new comprehensive full-funnel marketing strategy that could put a number on what true branding is really worth.
Partnering with Epsilon, FatFace was able to better understand their customers outside their own four walls and activate their 1P data to create personalised, impactful marketing campaigns, integrateing branding and performance to craft a cohesive strategy that enabled them to measure it back to incremental long-term impact on sales, revenue and profitability, both online and instore.
Challenges:
It can often be a difficult internal sell to activate first-party data because there's a lot of fear associated with it, especially from a legal standpoint. Epsilon was patient and thorough in working with our legal teams to ensure our customers’ privacy was protected. They helped us navigate a complex compliance process, making sure everything was safe and within data privacy regulations.
My advice to other retail marketers would be to put the time into educating the business about the benefits of using your first-party data and working with your legal teams and suppliers to get it over the line, but the juice is definitely worth the squeeze. The speed to value once you’re integrated is tenfold. The relevancy of our ads hugely increased which was felt in the immediate uptick across all our performance metrics.
Solution
What FatFace wasn’t doing 2 years ago was creating customer cohorts based on their own data. Epsilon was a huge part of that because they were able to provide us with accurate and scalable activation of our data that meant we could deliver personalised messaging that was differentiated depending on if someone was one of our best customers versus a lapsed customer, whilst also pulling in products, promos, locations and channel messaging that were more specific to them as an individual. Equally they were able to provide us with more demographic and behavioural insight than what we get through big tech partners like Google & Meta, which has been helpful in building out who our core customer is but also who the closest relating audiences were that would naturally come into the brand so we can build content and creative specifically for them.
Ep.5/
HOW YOUR first party Data CAN HELP to drive profitability
FatFace have always been historically great at creating engaging, beautiful video content. But the lack of more granular targeting and measurement in Linear TV, combined with high cost always held us back, meaning it never got the eyeballs it deserved. Leveraging our first-party data with Epsilon’s ID in CTV was game-changing! Personally, as a marketer, there is no greater joy than seeing your best brand content on TV!
The results speak for themselves….
1. In 2023 alone, FatFace was able to reach 120K existing FatFace users and 1M new users with CTV, achieving a 97% average VTR. That’s over 28 thousand hours of FatFace CTV content watched by qualified audiences on TV screens in the UK in 1 year.
2. When tracking new site visits and comparing their brand engagement to a baseline over the next 6months, users driven to the FatFace site were:
a. 35% more likely to re-visit
b. 2.5x more likely to purchase online
c. Generating 4.6x more revenue per site visit
3. Being able to target and measure users across multiple channels yielded impressive results. We saw that when speaking to new users across multiple formats they were 3.8 times more likely to visit the website and 4.1x more likely to purchase than users who had only been spoken to with a single media channel.
Ready to see how you can start utilsing your first party data to grow your brand? Contact me today for a free consultation!
