HMV

Traditional segmentations fail to understand the whole customer opportunity 

The Client:

Music and entertainment retailer – UK operation

The Brief:

HMV’s online business and loyalty scheme had successfully built up a sizable database of registered customers looking for a more involved relationship with the brand.

With such a vast portfolio of products spanning five separate entertainment categories, the insights remained buried deep in the transactional data.

TIH was engaged to explore the depth of opportunity within the data using the customer lens – the specific purpose being to engage the wider business to drive sales growth through all channels.

We worked with the Group Marketing and Multichannel Director.

 

The Challenge:

  • Understand how customers were shopping with HMV and identify their specific needs.
  • Understand a customer’s capacity to shop with HMV to channel resource appropriately.
  • Realign the clustering of products purchased based upon customer lifetime baskets and not industry-driven genres.
  • Use the product groupings to predict interest in new titles.

Our Approach:

  • The first stage was to format a robust structure for the database, linking data from disparate sources all at the single customer level.
  • To cut through such a large flat base we used a combination of complex statistical manipulation and good old fashioned human intervention.
  • We created two distinct axes relevant only to HMV and the emotional relationship the customer has with the brand and the product.
  • The output of this deep analysis powered a personal and relevant eCRM programme

The Output:

Fully segmented database to drive all direct communications with customers.

An understanding of potential value for growth and development.

Strategic support to develop these segmentations into contact strategies.

Ongoing analysis exploring the customer behaviour, to provide value-driving customer insight for tactical campaigns and solutions.

Designed, generated and delivered the emails (on average 10 per week).

 

Business Impact:

Changes in the basic approach to targeting of communications showed up to 50% increase in engagement and 10 times increase in purchase rate.