How Nude by Nature is using data to prove digital's worth

Proving the value of marketing’s contribution to Nude by Nature’s bottom line has become a reality for the digital team after rolling out a data-driven reporting solution.

The Australian-based beauty products company has been on a quest over the past two years to accelerate growth and place renewed emphasis on its customer service proposition. To support this, the digital team has overhauled data and customer management platforms and built its own best-of-best marketing technology stack, incorporating an ecommerce platform (WooCommerce), customer data platform (Tealium), email marketing system (MailChimp), retargeting tool (MediaMath), DSP (Sizmek) and website tool (Optimizely).

Nude by Nature head of digital, Gavin Merriman, told CMO another vital component in the mix is Domo’s business reporting platform. This is being used to pull together marketing reports from thousands of different sources such as social media channels, Google Analytics, marketing platforms and the brand’s ecommerce site.

While Merriman knew his team’s efforts to embrace customer lifecycle marketing were sound in theory, it was less easy to prove their value in reality.

“We also had no real visibility around ecommerce performance. We’d implemented some changes to our loyalty scheme, lifecycle marketing through our marketing cloud investments, and put campaigns in to try and drive things like increasing second purchase and growing our active base,” he explained.

“We weren’t sure they were working – you can see sales going up, but beyond that, you don’t know what it is driving it. Domo gave us that visibility.”

Without the ability to clearly identify whether campaigns are working, there was a danger of pulling back on the wrong ones, Merriman said. “The loyalty scheme, for example, gives people discounts. Fortunately, we could see they were having the desired impact and dialled them up instead,” he said.

Work commenced on implementing the new lifecycle marketing approach in late 2015. As well as technology deployments, the company redeveloped its website, and relaunched Nude by Nature’s social channels.

Once Domo was hooked up to core marketing systems, Merriman and his team began creating a series of in-depth reports, such as active customer base, and average time to second purchase. The team initially accessed default reporting dashboards and visualisations. From there, work was undertaken to customise reports.

“For example, the default report shows just three months’ worth of Facebook data, whereas we wanted to see growth over a year,” Merriman said.

Once ecommerce data was hooked up, more advanced reporting could be completed. Merriman said his most used reports are active customer base (those who’ve shopped in the last six months), lapsing (between 6-12 months) and inactive customers (haven’t purchased for more than 12 months).

“The other key report is average days to second purchase: We saw a lot of people would come in to the site, make one purchase then never shop again historically, which is quite worrying,” he said. “We started making changes to programs and off the back of it… and as soon as we started implementing nurture programs, we could see the improvement.”

Information being derived from Domo is actively informing the digital team’s priorities and approach, and it’s significantly cut down time teams spend on producing reports manually. Importantly, the data visualisations are also helping Merriman showcase the success of efforts in reports to his board and executives.

“We’re better able to show growth and that helps secure extra budget,” he said. “It seems more credible.

“When we put those reports together to try and look at the impact of the changes we’d made, we could see it works. You know in theory it should work, but you never know in practice and we could see it was, which was nice.”

Nude by Nature has since plugged its customer experience support platform, Zendesk, into Domo and Merriman is looking to use the tool for more operational reporting.

Finding alignment through shared data

While the original justification for Domo was to support the digital team, Merriman said plans are afoot to extend the reporting capabilities to the sales function.

“Sales gets reports that come from all of our different retailers just coming in as Excel files, all of which are a bit different. The idea was we’d try and add all of that sales data and automate a lot of the reports that are quite manual at the moment, as well as build extra ones,” he said.

“After that, we’ll be rolling it out to the finance department. That’s essentially to build 4-5 reports we do every single month, which are very time consuming - half of our commercial finance manager’s time is spent preparing these reports. If we can automate them, then at that point, it’s across the whole business, and it makes more sense to start sharing data [dynamically].”

One unexpected use for Domo cited by Merriman was determining how much packaging needed to be ordered when the brand launched custom-designed boxes.

“We had to do in-depth analysis on how often someone makes just one purchase, or two, three. Then we could come up with the volume,” he said. “It’s little things like where Domo has been really useful.”

There is still a lot more integration work to be done in digital too, and Merriman’s next focus is looking at items that may go out of stock, and for merchandising. He’s also hopeful of bringing in cross-device usage data into the mix, in order to better understand what role mobile versus desktop plays in the buyer journey.

Work hasn’t stopped on the wider marketing technology stack either, and Merriman said he’s looking to unite Nude by nature’s ad serving platform, Sizmek, with its customer and audience segmentation platform, Tealium, to start better targeting media.

“We still have a large focus on trying to grow not just total sales, but also our social presence, which that has a big impact on brand,” he added. “There has been a refocus this year to leverage digital, especially in international markets. Our retailers have encouraged us to focus our spend on digital as that’s where we’re seeing the best results.”

Follow CMO on Twitter: @CMOAustralia, take part in the CMO conversation on LinkedIn: CMO ANZ, join us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CMOAustralia, or check us out on Google+:google.com/+CmoAu