Customer Retention: Big Data Helps Rue La La Reactivate Lapsed Customers

Big data has been a buzz phrase within the retail industry for the past year or more. That said, get 10 retailers in a room together and you might get 10 different definitions for what the term means. For Rue La La, an online flash-sales retailer of women's fashion apparel and accessories, big data meant connecting information across vendors to help it create targeted marketing campaigns to reactivate dormant customers.

Working with BrightTag, a provider of real-time, cloud-based marketing technologies, Rue La La segmented inactive customers and targeted them with relevant display ads. The campaign required Rue La La to match data between its CRM system and retargeting vendors.

"Customer data is one of our most valuable assets, but leveraging it across disparate collection points is a big challenge," said Eric Sherman, senior manager, acquisition marketing for Rue La La, in a BrightTag press release. "BrightTag solved that in short order by giving us a way to connect data and make it actionable."

Rue La La used BrightTag Fuse, a solution for real-time, cross-channel profile integration, to match data in the cloud instantly. The speed at which this occurred saved Rue La La time and money, and didn't require the retailer to reset browser cookies when customers revisited its website. By building unified customer profiles in the cloud, Rue La La can optimize targeting criteria in real time and focus its ad spend on dormant customers, rather than retargeting every person visiting the Rue La La website.

In addition, the matched data — and the corresponding display ads born from it — has helped Rue La La realize a 10 percent lift in conversion rate for its segment of lapsed customers vs. a control group.

"Marketers are struggling to connect and activate their data across channels and devices in real time," said Mike Sands, president and CEO of BrightTag, in the company's press release. "Rue La La is leading the way by creating an intelligent data foundation for strategically leveraging its cross-channel data assets for real-time marketing impact."