Leader
Summer 2022
Luxury British cacao grower and chocolatier Hotel Chocolat was founded in 2004 to make exciting chocolate with three guiding principles – authenticity, originality and ethics – that remain central to the brand’s success today.
With its Rabot Estate cacao farm, hotel restaurant and bar on the Caribbean Island of Saint Lucia, a chocolate manufacturing facility in Cambridgeshire and stores located across the UK and internationally, Hotel Chocolat occupies a unique space – being able to link all aspects of chocolate from the tree to the consumer.
Hotel Chocolat connects the world of sustainable cacao agriculture with the hedonism of top-quality chocolate.
“Ometria are very much part of the CRM team. We work with them on our strategies, we work with them on new ideas and opportunities, and frankly, without them we wouldn’t be able to deliver what we do.”
Amy Harman
Head of CRM, Loyalty & Subscriptions, Hotel Chocolat
Hotel Chocolat knows how important taste is, and that’s not just when it comes to their chocolate. Taste is at the center of everything they do, whether it’s their strong, sustainable, ethical brand identity, their mantra of ‘more cocoa, less sugar’, or their highly personalized approach to marketing experiences.
The pandemic rapidly accelerated Hotel Chocolat’s digital presence, and like many retailers, the brand gained a high volume of new customers from online channels as people continued to eat and gift chocolate. With Ometria powering next-level experiences and making sure the CRM team operated as efficiently as they could, the premium chocolate brand achieved some incredible CRM-driven results, and continue to do so; here’s how they did it.
Hotel Chocolat x Ometria The CRM team at Hotel Chocolat believes in understanding their customers and enriching the experience at every touchpoint with this knowledge. But delivering these kinds of experiences is easier said than done, especially if teams need to rely on other functions for support, or there are too many manual processes involved. In order to deliver amazing experiences at scale, efficiency is crucial.
With Ometria, the team has everything they need in one place, with marketer-owned customer data and insights, and sophisticated automation and AI capabilities that help with the heavy-lifting, they can move with speed and efficiency when bringing their CRM strategy to life.
The 'old school days of CRM' “In the old school days of CRM, you needed lots of different resources and skillsets. The Ometria platform has all of those capabilities in one place, allowing just one person to be the master of everything.”
Amy Harman
Head of CRM, Loyalty & Subscriptions, Hotel Chocolat
In order to deliver personalized, empathetic communications that are relevant every time for every customer, the team steers clear of generic ‘batch and blast’ sends, staying very conscious of messaging, frequency and tone, and personalization.
Ometria supports Hotel Chocolat in delivering relevant, tailored content and messaging at every touchpoint. Using exclusion rules and frequency capping within the platform, the CRM team can ensure that broadcast and automation emails are targeted just to relevant customers, and they deliver a truly balanced CRM strategy.
How does Ometria compare to other platforms? “Ometria allows us to have a complete picture of the customer. The platform ingests all of the retail VIP.me data from our stores, which means we’re able to see what our retail customers are doing, as well as what our digital customers are doing, enabling us to have a holistic view of our customers”
Amy Harman
Head of CRM, Loyalty & Subscriptions, Hotel Chocolat
One deliciously compelling way that preference data from the platform is used in campaigns is by personalizing for individual chocolate tastes. Whether it’s Milk, Dark, White, Fruity, or Vegan chocolate, the copy and imagery of Hotel Chocolat campaigns are personalized according to individual customer taste profiles.
The pandemic significantly accelerated Hotel Chocolat’s digital roadmap, and their online presence continues to grow alongside the return of bricks-and-mortar shopping.
One of the big strategic focuses the CRM team have as a result of this phenomenal growth is retaining these newly acquired customers, and reactivating those who haven’t purchased in a while.
By deepening their understanding of their customer, adding value through meaningful brand partnerships, staying true to their values, and sharing brand stories, Hotel Chocolat can engage and retain their customers without an over-reliance on discounts. The Ometria platform supports customer retention by helping Hotel Chocolat to understand what will resonate with individual customers, to deliver a consistent experience based on behavior and lifecycle stage, and by uncovering opportunities for additional revenue growth within their customer segments.
What's it like using Ometria? ‘When I think about the future of our CRM, one of the things we’ll be looking at is reactivating customers. We’ve already been hugely successful in reactivating 50% over last year, and it’s something that we want to continue driving as we look ahead.’
Amy Harman
Head of CRM, Loyalty & Subscriptions, Hotel Chocolat
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