A Perfect Marketing Marriage

For many, Memorial Day's unofficial start of summer means trips to the beach, pool parties and barbeques. For others, Memorial Day weekend represents the start of wedding season. Hundreds of thousands of couples across the country will walk down the aisle between now and September, with June being the most popular month to get hitched.

Chances are you or someone you know will be attending a wedding this season. And whether you admit it or not, you probably watched or read something about the Royal Wedding. The wedding industry is a $40 billion

a year industry, with bridal gowns being the No. 1 item on a bride’s shopping list. According to Brides.com, the average wedding dress costs $1,075. The average bride will spend about 6 percent of her wedding budget on the dress alone. It’s no wonder a well-known apparel retailer, best known for contemporary looks for adults and children alike, challenged Proclivity to help it find customers for the launch of its wedding gown business.
Finding a new target audience within an existing customer database is a difficult task, particularly if the product is a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. Wedding gowns are niche products for which campaign audience and timeliness are critical, and prior challenges with a wedding gown launch impeded the retailer's goals. The brand sought to ensure its new campaign led to revenue lift and product success without alienating customers who weren't ready or disinterested.

Focusing on its client’s goals, Proclivity centralized the retailer's data inside its customer valuation platform and analyzed its customer base to uncover the appropriate "wedding buyer" audience. Proclivity made good use out of the vast amounts of information the retailer already owned about their customers including detailed product/service data, extensive microbehaviors spanning several years observed on its website, search data, offline point-of-sale data, campaign response data, social network data and external market data sources.

Applying a proprietary approach, Proclivity’s technology platform calculated the real-time economic values that buyers expressed for purchasing a wedding gown, enabling the retailer to deliver messages to those with high value vs. those with low value.

Not only did Proclivity improve the standard results against the key performance indicators, it found more people that were in the market for wedding gowns. It also reduced the number of emails delivered to the wrong individuals, effectively leading to a decrease in unsubscriptions. This was crucial, especially when dealing with wedding-related products. The last thing you want to do is upset those that begrudgingly think of themselves as always a bridesmaid but never a bride.

The retailer saw significant improvements in key metrics, including clickthrough rate, order conversions and revenue lift. In fact, revenue was up as much as 266 percent across the its campaigns launched through Proclivity's platform. Where the retailer was once hesitant and worried about repeating a campaign mistake, now it's moving forward with certainty as it incorporates weddings as a very important part of its overall strategy.

Proclivity’s ability to calculate a customer’s valuation for wedding gowns meant the retailer was no longer faced with generalizing or guessing someone’s purchase intent. The retailer was able to hone in on a particular level of interest for wedding gowns and identify its representative economic value to maximize conversion and revenues. It's a strategy that lasts happily ever after.

Sheldon Gilbert is founder and CEO of Proclivity Systems, a platform that calculates the current market value for individual customers relative to specific items and services. Sheldon can be reached at sgilbert@proclivitysystems.com.