Optimizing SFMC for pharmacy chain to drive sales and boost ROI

Client

Regional Drugstore and Pharmacy Chain

Industry

  • Health & Life Sciences
  • Retail & Consumer Goods

Technology

  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Services

  • Customer Relationship Management
  • Data Integration
  • Digital Transformation
  • Marketing Automation
  • Marketing Strategy & Advisory
  • Platform Architecture & Advisory

About the Client

Northeast regional drugstore and pharmacy chain wanted to realize the full benefits of its SFMC investment, maximizing marketing spend and increasing sales with improved customer visibility and specific targeting of high-volume shoppers.

Challenge

  • Expensive legacy email marketing service
  • Scattered and incomplete customer profiles
  • Unsegmented email campaigns
  • Lack of automation
  • Small and stale email list
  • Low engagement
  • No email capture forms

A regional drugstore and pharmacy chain in the northeast, wanted to optimize its marketing efforts to maximize ROI on spend and drive greater in-store traffic with targeted campaigns for segmented groups of shoppers. Among these groups are members of the company’s loyalty program, and high-volume patrons (Platinum shoppers) that receive exclusive coupons.

These high-volume shoppers represent 40% of overall sales, spending three times more per shopping trip than other customers. But capturing customer emails proved challenging. Customers only needed to provide a phone number to access loyalty program membership and were historically skeptical of sharing their email addresses at check out.

They also had the option to complete rewards member profiles by logging into the company’s online portal, where they could see their transaction history and get coupons, but few customers completed the process. Similarly, the company hadn’t established a web-based email capture form, eliminating visibility into customers searching for its stores online.

In addition to utilizing digital and print advertising, the chain was sending out its “Sneak Peek” circular, a weekly email for members with upcoming deals, via a costly third-party email service provider to a small list of 50k subscribers, some of which had stale email accounts. This led to a low open rate and an average click-through rate (CTR) of only 1.5-3%.

Hoping to lower costs and bring its marketing in-house, the company invested in Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). However, after a less than ideal implementation, the client decided to look for a partner that could help them realize the full benefits of SFMC and maximize their ROI.

Strategy & Solution

  • Implemented and optimized SFMC
  • Unified customer data sources
  • Targeted email marketing strategy
  • Online email signup capture form

Ciberspring was brought on as an implementation partner to complete onboarding and configuration of the company’s SFMC instance, including Email Studio to host the “Sneak Peek” circular. After successful deployment, Ciberspring’s efforts were focused on unifying and integration three main sources of data—raw point of sale (POS) data, transaction data from loyalty customers, and online rewards member profiles—to build customer personas in SFMC. There are now over 50M transactions stored going back three years.

This solution allowed the company to map its customers, including if they are loyalty members or Platinum shoppers, how long they’ve been members, if they set up online profiles, how often they shop, and what they buy, to analyze and develop strategic email campaigns around that data.

Improving on the batch-and-blast campaigns that they used to use, the company can now target shoppers with specific offers.

Further, in order to generate new leads, Ciberspring developed an email signup capture form on the company’s website that funnels information into SFMC. Now, a person searching on the website can create an online profile and sign up for the “Sneak Peek” newsletter.

Results

  • Reduced email marketing costs
  • Grew weekly circular email list
  • Increased open rate and click-through-rate (CTR)
  • Accelerated loyalty rewards and Platinum Shopper memberships

Ciberspring’s SFMC implementation and solution helped ensure the company realized maximum value from its investment while cutting costs on email marketing spend and eliminating third-party vendor fees.

With unified customer data, persona journeys can be launched for segmented groups of customers with personalized messaging based on their transaction histories and shopping frequencies. By running analyses to detect behavioral changes in customers, the company can target loyalty rewards members with campaigns to drive them back into stores more often. And current campaigns targeting loyalty members who are close to achieving Platinum status have already been successful.

Even the number of loyalty members has increased to 500k, now with over 160k member profiles, due in part to a steady stream of sign-ups via the newly developed online capture form, which is generating 10 to 15 leads a day without any promotion.

Additionally, consolidating customer data sources and profiles has enabled the company to expand its Sneak Peek email list from 50k to 190k subscribers and increase the open rate and click-through rate.

Ciberspring’s solution has allowed the company to maximize the ROI on its SFMC investment, increase revenue, and decrease operating costs, all while solving key marketing concerns to help the business succeed.

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