Hunter

The challenge

Hunter is a footwear retailer known for its iconic wellington boots, boasting celebrities and royals among its customer base. Being a heritage brand means that Hunter is aware of the importance of maintaining the historic identity of the brand while adapting to the changing tastes of customers.

First, Hunter wanted to make sure all of its database were being targeted with the relevant content. The marketing team wanted to appeal to every shopper by minimizing generic sends and tailoring the emails they received, all whilst maintaining the luxury Hunter experience.

Hunter was keen that an ongoing personalized approach to CRM would not create an unmanageable workload. Hunter knew that they would need a platform that would maximize the customer experience, while doing the heavy lifting to enable personalization at scale; and this is where Ometria came in.

The solution

Together Hunter and Ometria crafted a tailor-made strategy for the heritage brand to help achieve the business’ goals of creating greater engagement and more revenue from the email channel.

Working with Ometria’s in-house experts on the strategy and deliverability, Hunter was able to leverage our retail marketing expertise, data-driven retail performance benchmarks and deliverability guidance to find opportunities to optimize the brand’s CRM strategy.

At the core of this strategy was a ‘test-and-learn’ plan for broadcast email. As Hunter wanted to ensure its marketing messages are relevant to all of its database, the plan focused on discovering the best ways of segmenting and personalizing Hunter’s broadcast email sends without creating a considerably greater workload for the team.  

Multiple data points were used to dictate this testing strategy, ranging from recent browsing behavior, lifecycle stage or loyalty tier, product category affinity or propensity to shop based on price point. 

All of these factors were applied to Hunter’s existing email marketing plan, considering seasonality and product launches. The ‘heavy lifting’ was minimized by using Ometria to streamline this personalization approach as the testing was implemented and iterated, showing Hunter where the biggest opportunities were in terms of revenue and engagement. 

Segmentation framework in practice

Two examples of how this approach was applied are Hunter’s ‘Boots’ and ‘Waterproofs’ broadcast campaigns where this personalization strategy was implemented, with the highlighted dynamic content.

Boots campaign

Hunter sent four versions of a campaign highlighting its top selling boot products. This framework worked to engage with differing segments and maximize their interests and likelihood to purchase again.

The version of the campaign that was received depended on factors such as:

• Whether a customer had recently purchased a pair of boots: this version of the email focused on personalized cross-sell of complementary products.
• Whether a customer had recently viewed but not purchased boots: this version focused on personalized recommendations based on the customer’s browsing behavior.
• Whether the recipient had made a purchase from Hunter yet: this version reminded shoppers of their welcome incentive and highlighted in-demand products.

Waterproof range campaign

Hunter used segmentation to optimize its broadcast email promoting its waterproof range. 

The version of the campaign that was received depended on the following factors:

• Celebrating a first purchase anniversary: using the campaign to re-engage customers who had first shopped around this time in the previous year with an incentive and personalized product recommendations about what they might purchase with it.
• Leads yet to make a first purchase: encouraging subscribers to make their first purchase by highlighting the popular waterproof Wellington boot in the hero image, as well as the welcome offer for the recipient.