Case Study: Foot Shop & Occam DM 

RUNNER UP - Best use of FastStats 2009 Awards

Using FastStats to drive additional profit through intelligent targeting based on customer profile and purchasing habits

Company Overview
Foot Shop is a retailer of footwear with a number of brands catering for some specific niche markets within the UK and abroad. A family owned multi-channel retail company selling specialist footwear, socks, hosiery and foot comfort products, Foot Shop’s sales channels include; mail order, wholesale, internet and retail shops.

Foot Shops brands include:

- Cosyfeet                                     - Walktall
- look at my crazy shoes.com        - healthyshoes.co.uk
- disabledaccessories.com

Objectives
The objective for Occam was to provide Foot Shop with access to their customer data for analysis, planning and campaign purposes with the aim of driving additional profit through intelligent targeting based on customer profile and purchasing habits. Foot Shop sells via the internet, mail order and at around 180+ stockists in the UK. Previously, customer data was held within a SQL database off site (to which no access was available) and also within a CRM system, Elucid.

Foot Shop recognised that access to their data for analysis and campaigning purposes would be highly advantageous to the business as it would facilitate a deeper understanding of its client base, and enable the business to divide, segment, and then communicate with its customers appropriately and effectively.

Solution
As a result, Foot Shop identified the FastStats counting, analysis and campaign engine as compatible with its needs and was recommended to work with Occam to scope and, ideally, deliver a solution. The solution needed to provide access to Foot Shop’s data for querying, analysis and campaign purposes. Occam set about achieving this objective through the creation of a single customer view, combining multiple retail brand data from Elucid with web sourced sales, and then applying deduplication and suppression techniques to produce a clean data source to be used for marketing purposes.

FastStats was then deployed to provide access to the data through a user friendly interface. Staff at Foot Shop were trained on how to use the software and were supported by Occam’s software consultants. Response information was fed back into the Foot Shop database and used to refine future campaigns, along with the use of transactional and basket analysis to determine the next best or most likely purchase per customer. This enabled communications to be tailored for cross-sell and up sell depending on previous purchase patterns.

Data Consolidation
Occam was provided with two main data sources; an SQL database which had previously been used for ad hoc activity and the Foot Shop Elucid operational database. These data sources were then processed through Occam’s core data processing systems in order to both cleanse and standardise the separate customer data sources, as well as subsequently identifying inter- and intra-duplicate customer records at individual, family and address level.

Occam also supplied the resulting data back to Foot Shop in a suitable format for bulk re-entry into the Elucid system, meaning that the core operational system could also benefit from cleansed data with deduplication flags.

FastStats Implementation
This process was broken down into the following sections:

• Consultation and agreement on the data required in FastStats for marketing activity. The primary requirement was to be able to identify customer activity and spending across the multiple Foot Shop brands and so the key data centred around the account, purchase and returns tables within Elucid. This data would allow Foot Shop to create key purchase metrics against each customer for both the individual brands and the overall customer record previously identified through Occam’s data processing activity.  
• Creation of a SQL view within the Foot Shop Elucid system that would be used to extract the required data for each FastStats refresh. Once defined, this view would form the basis of a fortnightly data extract to be transferred to Occam allowing for a refresh of the FastStats environment
• Creation of a FastStats design to take the regularly supplied data, prepare and format it for use by Foot Shop staff through the Discoverer interface. This design included the creation of standard purchase metrics as well as flag arrays at unique customer level to show purchase by brand name. This then provided an easy way to both identify and profile select key customers for cross- and up-sell activity across the database. Brand crossover became a simple FastStats variable that showed an unambiguous view of how many customers were spending money with different combinations of Foot Shop brands.
• Connectivity testing to ensure secure data transfers between Occam and Foot Shop. It was important that the data being transferred to Occam each fortnight was done so in a secure manner, and was picked up by the Occam solution quickly and effectively to rebuild the environment. It was equally important that any data extracted from the FastStats database could be securely transferred back to Foot Shop without issue.  
• Discoverer user training courses broken down by user type and FastStats module. Training courses were provided in a staged manner covering the standard FastStats modules and capabilities. Following this further training was provided on the use of the Foot Shop data within FastStats to allow additional relevancy to be added to the training examples and user requirements.
• Solution launched. Following successful user acceptance the solution was launched as a live system.

Results
Since the implementation of the solution, Foot Shop’s targeting and customer selections have improved email turnover by over 200% and project planning times have been cut by 50%. Furthermore, in the last 6 months marketing costs have reduced by 10% due to more effective targeting of customers, whilst sales have increased by 15%. The ability to clearly identify which customers should be used for different campaigns and offers, whilst avoiding those customers who are unlikely to respond positively is clearly making a difference, and Foot Shop are trading comfortably ahead of budget during these turbulent times.

Foot Shop’s Marketing Director, Robin Beech comments: “Occam took the time to understand our business, our culture and the needs of our customers. Now that we have been using FastStats for a year we are comfortable moving into a new phase of direct marketing, one where we are able to interact with customers seamlessly though multiple channels, being able to measure the absolute effectiveness of each, how they compliment each other and how customers then respond.”

Excelsior Reporting
Occam has also developed a reporting environment within Excelsior to allow Foot Shop to be presented with clear key metrics across brands and over time. The report below shows Foot Shop elements such as average order values, repeat purchasers and retention rates, all able to be displayed by brand and by month of the year.



Future
Recent discussion has taken place around the expansion of FastStats skills within Foot Shop and collaboration with Occam to utilise FastStats for a more strategic position within the business, allowing for such activities as automated trigger-based campaigns, implementation of customer segmentation, use of predictive modelling to better target customers and prospects, and identification of customers for up-selling based on transactional history and purchase patterns. Joint planning between Foot Shop and Occam look to ensure the increasingly effective use of FastStats as a major component in the marketing teams armoury.

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