Challenge
An Alliant DataHub Member since 2010, this national brand delivers iconic beverage products to homes and businesses around the country. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic there was an inevitable and drastic drop-off for office deliveries, forcing the team to adjust their strategies. Fortunately, the brand also experienced an organic increase in demand for home delivery, but to substantially offset the business account declines they needed to grow customer acquisition and order volumes.
Solution
The brand developed a strategic marketing approach in partnership with their agency to drive customer acquisition with multiple consumer touchpoints, driving response and engagement by targeting the same audiences in direct mail and social. The Alliant team recommended product-specific response and optimization models, as well as a crossover model covering four other product lines. Having recently taken a strategic pause from direct mail campaigns, the marketing team did not have recent campaign files to provide as a model seed, instead providing a sample of their best customers for look-alike modeling.
Alliant took a two-step approach, first scoring compiled prospect sources pre-merge with a direct mail optimization model to identify top responding segments. Then, the post-merge mail file was scored using a suite of six custom look-alike models to drop the lowest indexing segments.
The audiences generated by each model were activated in the mail and uploaded into the brand's Facebook account. Additional consumers who were not predicted to be responsive to direct mail but were still qualified were also added to the Facebook audiences.
Results
Combining the six custom models with coordinated multichannel delivery, the brand exceeded 20% efficiency in customer acquisition cost (CAC) while significantly increasing annual mail quantity. The use of direct mail and social was an efficient way to increase exposure to the home delivery offer before, during, and after the in-home direct mail window, while also delivering incremental socially sourced customers.
