Fred Perry

The challenge

Fred Perry is an iconic fashion brand. Founded by the eponymous triple Wimbledon Champion in 1952, it has a rich history and is recognizable across the world. 

As a result of its strong brand identity, Fred Perry has always had healthy customer acquisition, which has been its main focus. In recent years, however, it became apparent to the CRM team that they could grow the brand further by targeting customer retention. By focusing on its VIP customers, the team theorized that they could transform Fred Perry’s customer retention. 

“It really started when the COVID-19 pandemic happened. In lockdown we had to find ways to engage with our customers on an almost daily basis without sounding commercial,” said Marni Dasanjh, Head of Social Commerce at Fred Perry. “We wanted this engagement to be very organic by using real Fred Perry fans and making the shirt the hero. By using these images and the stories we can tell about the shirts, we can create a deeper connection between our customers and Fred Perry.” 

As part of this new focus, Fred Perry wanted to go on a journey to really understand its customers, particularly those VIP customers that buy multiple times. That’s where Ometria and its Retail Success Model came in. 

Solution

The Retail Success Model – Ometria’s unique approach

Ometria’s Retail Success team performed an audit of Fred Perry’s performance and compared it to industry benchmarks. By combining this audit with the Fred Perry team’s commercial goals, the Retail Success team was able to produce a customized Marketing Action Plan for Fred Perry. The plan took into account the importance of preserving Fred Perry’s brand value while allowing the team to see commercial results.

“The marketing plan really brought into focus what we needed to do. Before this, our approach was more about spread-betting, trying lots of things to see what worked” said Marni. “But Ometria’s Retail Success team showed us that if we improved certain metrics, the commercial gains we would see would be significant.”

The Ometria team demonstrated how various marketing campaigns could improve different metrics. For example, how increasing active customer and subscriber rates by just 5% could have a massive impact on customer retention. These milestones gave Fred Perry clear objectives on how to improve customer retention that the whole business could get behind. 

“We set up weekly project meetings across the business to make sure we were driving the plan forward.” said Marni. “The Ometria team were brilliant at helping us champion this plan internally, and also reassuring us that if we couldn’t see the benefit in the short term, there was evidence in the data pointing to long-term success. It’s changed the way we look at retention overall and helped the business to understand clearly the direction we were taking.”

Focusing on retention and loyalty

The Fred Perry team acted on the recommendations from Ometria and looked to build new automation campaigns and optimize many of its existing automations. The team used the Ometria platform to restructure their campaigns to target customers based on their customer lifecycle stage. This included changing the customer win-back campaigns to target customers that were identified as lapsed or at-risk with personalized content. 

The team was able to use Ometria’s product recommendation tools throughout their automation campaigns, featuring recommendations based on customers’ browsing behavior or category affinity. On top of this, the team is able to communicate to VIP customers whenever there is an event at their local store, allowing them to align the online and offline experience.

Fred Perry is also making use of Ometria’s social sync features. These allow retailers to build lookalike audiences on Facebook/Meta and retarget customers across these networks. The team are beginning to use these social networks to run welcome campaigns as well as lapsed customer campaigns. 

The Fred Perry team operates across six languages and 14 countries, each of which requires targeted and localized campaigns, crafted carefully to embody the Fred Perry brand. All of these campaigns are managed through the Ometria platform. 

“We appreciate the freedom and visibility that we get with the Ometria platform, as well as how far we are able to segment our customer base.” said Rita Cruz, Digital Marketing Executive at Fred Perry. “Building campaigns is easy and intuitive in Ometria, and we are easily able to build some really complex and personalized customer journeys.”

One of the next steps for the Fred Perry team is to expand and understand social audiences further, and explore using SMS as part of their campaigns in certain territories.