Case Study: How BDEX Data Helped a Client Rule the Holidays

Find out how Cole Haan, a global retailer of shoes and fashion accessories, successfully promoted a 7-day Black Friday sale with the help of BDEX

Cole Haan is a major designer of shoes and other fashion accessories. They were looking to expand audience reach and engagement over the holiday shopping season. BDEX data helped them with a marketing campaign that earned them $93,000 in new revenue, a nearly 10x ROI.

The holiday season is always a huge opportunity for retailers. A Mastercard report showed that retail sales in the U.S. grew 5.1% over the 2018 holiday season, to more than $850 billion. This was the strongest growth in the past six years.

It’s easy to see why Cole Haan wanted to use the opportunity to expand their customer base and boost holiday sales.

To make this happen, the brand needed a quality data solution. One that would identify new customers and help the company better connect with the right ones at the right time. They connected with BDEX. BDEX helped bridge the gap between brands and consumers, fostering real human connections, and revenue.

Why did Cole Haan choose BDEX?

Here’s what happened with Cole Haan’s Black Friday campaign.

The decision was simple. Cole Haan was looking to execute a mass customer-acquisition campaign over the holidays. They needed to pull in large amounts of reliable consumer data. And with the large number of retail and shopping segments the BDEX Data Exchange Platform (DXP) has to offer, it was the clear choice for a successful targeting campaign.

The customer targeting process

A solution to better connect Cole Haan with new customers was to identify consumers who already had a history buying women’s and men’s shoes online. As David Finkelstein, CEO of BDEX, said, The trick was for us to identify new consumers who weren’t existing customers, so it was about bringing new customers to them.

BDEX was able to identify half a million customers to target. Cole Haan then successfully targeted these users with an email campaign. The focus of the campaign was getting those targeted customers to the brand’s online store. (A 2018 Deloitte holiday retail survey predicted that online spending would account for 57% of purchases.)

These targeted consumers weren’t just people who bought shoes once; they bought a lot of shoes. This further narrowed the targeting effort to connect the brand with the right people.

The marketing team then delivered the campaign over a span of two days to shoppers who aligned with the key identified factors.

The numbers

Cole Haan saw major successes. The benefits the brand saw from the holiday email targeting campaign, using BDEX’s identified customers, were:

  • 449 unique new customers
  • 829 product purchases from these new customers
  • 79% of the purchased products were footwear

Aside from tackling the brand’s goals for acquiring new customers, BDEX helped Cole Haan see a huge ROI on the campaign. The brand ended up seeing a $93,000 return on their initial investment of $9,500. That’s close to a 10x return. In addition, there was an influx of new customers who spent more than the average client of Cole Haan.

Of course, these are just the initial purchases seen from the campaign. The lifetime value of a customer is different for every company, but Finkelstein from BDEX says Cole Haan’s return over a lifetime could be several hundred thousand dollars.

Needless to say, with the help of the BDEX DXP, Cole Haan successfully grew its customer base and saw a big ROI on its holiday campaign.

Why work with BDEX?

BDEX offers data infrastructure that powers human connectivity by delivering the right insight to the right people at the right time. The BDEX Data Exchange Platform (DXP), which is the first of its kind, continues to help companies, like Cole Haan, close the sale and grow their customer base, whether the company is large, small, or somewhere in the middle.

BDEX’s data as a service (DaaS) solution provides actionable data to businesses of all sizes, including data for email retargeting, geofencing, direct mail, and more. With over 700 million mobile-to-email ID connections, BDEX will help you implement a cross-device matching solution that works. You’ll be able to market to the same consumer across multiple channels, find customers across platforms and target new customers.

To learn more about how BDEX’s data solutions can transform your approach to consumer data as well as your campaign’s, get in touch with the team today.