return from personalized emails
The Client
Founded in 1976, MCM Worldwide is a global leather luxury goods brand. The company sells its products online, through franchises and directly operated stores, and via wholesale accounts.
The Situation
MCM’s direct-to-consumer channel was continuing to experience growth, increasing the brand’s penetration of the U.S. and EU markets. Wanting to support that growth, MCM was constantly searching for ways to enhance personalization while controlling costs. In 2018, MCM began an endeavor to modernize its martech stack and get a better grasp of the digital and data landscape.
The Challenge
MCM knew they wanted to get ahead of the CDP trend and adopt a solution they could grow into. Specifically, MCM wanted to use customer data to build personas for each sales region according to product affinity, helping the company’s design and creative teams better connect with target audiences.
MCM also wanted insights into where each customer was in their journey toward repurchase, which would allow their social media managers and store directors to determine the optimal time to reach out and which products they should recommend based on a customer’s purchase history. Any machine learning models they created would need to be transparent and exportable to numerous disparate platforms.
The Solution
MCM began using Acquia CDP in 2019 in an effort to reduce marketing costs while delivering highly personalized, relevant customer experiences. But it wasn’t until 2020 that the company delved into the product’s machine learning capabilities and started letting artificial intelligence (AI) dictate strategies. With the help of Acquia’s machine learning team, MCM began taking advantage of the CDP’s Product Clusters and Likelihood to Buy machine learning models to inform campaigns.
Specifically, MCM used Product Clusters to enhance personalization beyond email campaigns. MCM created personas, assigning each customer to a cluster, e.g. traveling brand enthusiast, women’s campaign hero, small leather goods bundle buyer, etc. Next, the marketing team extrapolated further details on that cluster’s behavior and buying habits. Lastly, MCM launched campaigns targeting the best-selling product within each cluster rather than the overall top-selling product. By using the Product Clusters model, MCM was able to more effectively make product recommendations, which improved customization and ultimately conversion without adding effort to the creative process for email content.
Additionally, MCM used Acquia CDP to drive value to offline customers through its clienteling strategy. By combining Product Clusters with Cohort Analysis and making that data available to MCM’s in-store personnel, they were able create profiles for offline customers and target them based on their spend threshold, product cluster and other data.
Acquia CDPs reporting and analytics have been eye-opening for MCM. The dashboards in Acquia CDP have helped standardize KPI reporting for MCM, giving top-level management an at-a-glance view of KPIs, growth, etc. across regions. And Acquia CDP’s Identity Resolution Engine has helped provide the brand with a true holistic customer view. Prior to Acquia CDP, it was hard for MCM to connect the dots if a customer shopped across countries or regions. By deduping at the global layer, MCM was able to remove multiple instances of the same customer, increasing the accuracy of metrics like average order value and making it possible to identify a global client.
Today, MCM’s marketers use Acquia CDP daily, and executives consult key marketing dashboards on a regular basis. Additionally, MCM makes its machine learning models available for its agencies and partners to use, helping them maximize the value of those investments.
The Results
Once MCM started using Acquia CDP, the company was able to achieve results quickly; Acquia’s machine learning team trained the models over a 3-week period and MCM was able to use them across numerous channels almost immediately.
Using Acquia CDP, MCM was able to segment its audience for greater personalization. MCM’s personalized emails generated 3X more revenue than the previous, standard “business-as-usual” emails
From an organizational perspective, MCM found Acquia CDP to be especially adept at supporting cross-channel marketing and email segmentation, but the machine learning models have been a true game-changer in how the brand understands its customers. In essence, Acquia CDP has simplified the myriad of data into actionable insights that the company’s merchandising and paid media teams can use.
In the future, MCM plans to expand the number of ecosystems connected to and leveraging data from the CDP, in an effort to continue improving customers' experiences at every touchpoint.
