Dior Tries Conversational Marketing On for Size

In the United States, Dior's marketing organization faced three major challenges: engaging in targeted cross-sell and up-sell strategies with shoppers who are not repeat customers; improving communications with its best, most loyal customers; and increasing overall brand awareness.

 

Dior now uses Neolane Inc.s conversational marketing technology to store all of its U.S. customer data generated from every touch-point -- including catalog, e-mail and in-store. Dior then deploys advanced analytics to segment customers into several categories.

 

"The ability to transform our valuable customer information into targeted, personalized, more effective customer relationship management campaigns has improved exponentially with Neolane," says Lisa Hawkins, senior vice president of marketing, Dior. "From a corporate perspective, we can now slice and dice customer information any way we want for sales and marketing purposes. Dior now has a better view into its customers' preferences and shopping habits, and we can educate them about our products appropriately."

 

Benefitting from Neolane's single data mart integrated with a list hygiene provider, analytics and marketing automation capabilities, Dior has an improved view into its customers' preferences and shopping habits. This enables the company to personalize communications and educate customers about products appropriately through e-mail marketing, direct mail and other channels.

 

This more targeted approach enables each boutique's sales team to further engage with customers through a personalized follow-up phone call or email. As a result, for the 2009 Fall/Winter catalog, Dior achieved a double digit increase in response versus the previous seasons mailer.

 

Additionally, Dior can track several important customer statistics including: 12-month average shopping cart value, number of products per transaction, items purchased, price paid and highest priced item purchased. The company then creates sophisticated reports on marketing effectiveness across all of its channels and tracks POS data back to each campaign. This enables Dior to make decisions about its level of marketing investments in specific channels.

 

Dior plans to expand its use of the Neolane platform to further drive successful analytics-based customer relationship marketing activities, which include automated event-triggered marketing campaigns and the flexibility to execute ad-hoc campaigns around events, trunk shows and luncheons.