Dune boosts sales using personalised advertising

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Jun 18, 2019

UK fashion footwear chain Dune London said this week that it's driven a £4.4 million rise in incremental revenue over the last three-and-a-half years by overhauling its marketing and shifting to personalised advertising based on advanced data analysis and insights.

It means it’s been able to “deliver the right message, for the right person, at the right time” and this has helped it “win new customers and increase customer spend and purchases, driving a 7:1 return on advertising spend.”

In a period when the UK has seen an unprecedented number of store closures and a weakening of the overall footwear market, the company implemented the new approach as it ramped up efforts to secure more market share.

The aim was to win new customers and get existing customers to spend more. It did so by linking up with personalised digital marketing provider Conversant and implementing a programme that uses “both historical and real-time data to drive customer lifecycle messaging and increased purchased rate.”

“We’ve got four years of live historical data, plus all of the data we imported to the campaign,” said the shoe chain’s Head of Performance Marketing, Mark Blenkinsop. “We know our customers and our customers' buying habits.” He said that by using the technology to remember who they are, and stay communicating with them, “over time, you win that person, and you gain market share.”

He added that it only takes getting the customer “to come back and buy just one more category” to double the number of purchases that person makes. “One additional purchase may not sound a lot, but if you start to do this at scale, and the whole process is automated, then you really do start moving the dial,” he said. “As any marketer knows, it's much more expensive to keep marketing to new customers.”

Based on the Conversant insight, and data revealed by Dune’s own team, customers and prospects were targeted with over 26,000 display creatives, personalised to each individual recipient. And the company tested the response and value created against the baseline activity of a customer group that doesn't receive any Dune ads. That’s how it reached the £4.4 million figure.