Interflora

Challenge

Interflora is a network of 900 florists across the UK and Ireland, delivering hand-crafted flower arrangements from local artisan florists to customers. Its retail calendar is dominated by 3 main peaks: Christmas, Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day. Interflora wanted to further support its community of florists by improving its customer retention rate outside of these peak times. 

The issue for the CRM team at Interflora was that they were not taking a very targeted approach to their customer communication. 

“We were taking a very ‘batch and blast’ approach to our email marketing,” said Laura Hickey, Senior CRM Manager at Interflora. “At best, we were grouping customers based on how recently they’d shopped with us. On top of that we were focused on broadcast sends, and we hadn’t been able to bring much automation in to our process.”

With the goal of retaining customers outside of the commercial peaks, Laura had diagnosed that taking a more targeted approach was a way to achieve this, and investing in automated campaigns would allow Interflora to unlock this growth. But with endless options, where should Laura and her team focus, and how could they create a business case for this approach? 

That’s where Ometria, and its Retail Success Model came in. 

Solution

The Retail Success Model

Ometria’s Retail Success team performed an audit of Interflora’s customer data to identify opportunities. The Retail Success Model is a series of four proprietary AI algorithms that have been trained on over 20 billion retail customer touchpoints, designed to uncover revenue opportunities for CRM teams to grow their businesses. 

With this data audit in place, the Retail Success team were able to compare Interflora’s approach to industry benchmarks and to suggest a series of improvements.

“The key thing the Retail Success Model gave us was clarity.” said Laura Hickey. “It broke the data down in a really clear way, and gave my team the details we needed, as well as providing enough of a high-level overview for people outside our team to grasp what we were looking to do.”

The output was a Marketing Action Plan that Ometria produced for Interflora. The plan pointed out which automations the CRM team should build in order to have the biggest impact on its goals. On top of this, the process allowed Laura and her team to see how different reports and insights within the Ometria platform could help them optimize their marketing efforts: 

“When you suddenly have access to all this data in a platform it can be overwhelming. The Ometria team assisted us with understanding the data and how we could action it within the Ometria platform to take things to another level.”

Most of all the Marketing Action Plan gave the rest of the business clear visibility into what the CRM team were planning. “It was really helpful in allowing other teams to understand what we were doing, but it also gave us the justification for investment in development resources. Building a business case for these changes is so important, and Ometria  made this much simpler by providing the supporting information, which can often be hard to quantify” said Laura. 

Investing in automation

Using Ometria Interflora were able to set up more automated campaigns that targeted its customers based on their lifecycle stage. This meant that Interflora could use automations to prevent customers from becoming ‘lapsed’. 

One of the most successful automated campaigns that Interflora set up was its anniversary campaign. By targeting customers around the one-year anniversary of their previous purchases with targeted messages, Interflora were able to easily set up an automation that had a great impact on its growth. 

Building these automations in the Ometria platform is straightforward. “We have built some complicated campaigns that use multiple channels, such as our recent Mother’s Day campaign,” says Rachel Elliott, CRM Manager at Interflora. “Coordinating these complex campaigns in the Ometria platform is all intuitive and self-explanatory.”

A more personalized approach

As a result of the customer insights that Ometria was able to give Interflora, the CRM team could identify key customer segments. By speaking to customer segments with more relevant messaging Interflora saw great improvements in customer engagement rates.

On top of this, Interflora was also able to personalize the messaging in its campaigns based on what the recipient had purchased previously.  For instance, Interflora started to test whether people who bought plants previously responded better to an invitation to buy plants again or if they would prefer a more generic message. 

As well as this, Interflora started testing at what point and at what level discounts should be introduced, using Ometria’s A/B testing to assess the results. 

Interflora has also experimented with Ometria’s social sync tool which allows users to build audiences in Facebook/Meta from the Ometria platform. This allows Interflora to orchestrate cross-channel campaigns aimed at retaining customers.

As well, Interflora could start to use customer segments built in Ometria’s platform to supplement its direct mail campaigns. By matching these audiences, Interflora can send relevant follow-up emails to those customers who receive the direct mail campaigns. This allows Interflora to maximize the return on the direct mail campaign.

The next steps for Interflora are bringing product recommendations into more automated campaigns. “We’re excited to start testing out Ometria’s product recommendations, starting with our basket abandonment campaigns. We want to test which product categories perform best and use those findings to optimize the campaigns further.” said Rachel.