Specialty retail

Specialty retailers’ customers have well-defined needs and strong top-of-mind perception about different options available. Positioning, external factors and presence in the right channels play a crucial role within the industry, providing sustainable competitive edge in marketing for those companies who understand their customers the best.

Results from our cooperation with Musti Group

The best month ever in terms of sales and margin
+50% improvement in leaflet marketing ROI
+500k€ annual run-rate sales increase

We analyzed unaddressed direct mail efficiency on postal code level with our partner Sellforte. We piloted the results based on the analysis. The result was best ever sales month, driven by successful Haukutut Hinnat campaign and media. I am very excited about this!

Juhana Lamberg Country Manager at Musti Group

Read the case studies

Promotions & positioning

Media items are the biggest performance drives when optimizing media investments. Recognizing how much incremental sales and margin each promotion brings enables the retailer to maximize short-term sales without sacrificing the brand value in the process.

External demand drivers

Although company-specific, marketing performance is more or less correlated with external factors such as seasonalities, weather and consumption trends. Understanding how these affect the campaigns’ successfulness helps specialty retailers to predict upcoming months’ demand & sales.

Presence in the right channels

Online marketing channels have been praised for their efficiency for some time now, but the latest analyses have revealed that the metrics are somewhat faulty. Having a comprehensive overview across different channels and campaigns supports company’s growth both in the short and long run.

Positioning. Specialty retailers face a challenging price image competition. On the other hand, customers want their products for as cheap as possible, and on the other hand the brand should remain prestigious. Finding the best promotions requires thorough analysis of which customer segments each discount attracts, how it affects normal-priced products’ sales and what is the combined short- and long-term sales impact. Sellforte helps specialty retailers to:

Monitor which promotions help to win new customers without decreasing the CLV for the existing customer base
Reveal each promotion’s short- and long-term effects (e.g. cannibalization, stock-up & basket halo) on normal-priced sales performance
Appear as a premium brand that knows its customers’ preferences

External demand drivers. Strong brands attract organic traffic on their own, but to achieve the full commercial potential of each campaign managers need to tap into the latest consumption trends on weekly basis. Seasonalities, Google search popularity and weather data integration into the Marketing ROI metrics helps the retailers on one hand to understand year-over-year changes in sales and marketing performance, and on the other hand predict with high certainty how to maximize results with future media and campaign plans. Sellforte’s software enables:

Recognising the seasonal and weekly trends during which the retailer’s media investments have the highest ROI
Including historical weather data and weather forecasts in the analytics as one of the indicator in past results and future predictions
Import Google Trends data into the system to monitor demand variation and support SEM-optimization

Presence in the right channels. Even the strongest brands with relevant promotion assortments have to compete for consumers’ top of mind. Although consumers are spending more and more time online, allocating media budget to online channels won’t be the best solution for most companies. For the majority of specialty retailers, the most profitable customer segments can be won (and lost) in offline channels that act as effective touchpoints throughout the decision making journey. Winning consumers’ top of mind requires advanced analytics that are able to attribute sales and margin uplifts for each media on daily level. With Sellforte, retailers can:

See the Media ROI for all channels on overall level, in different campaigns and across different geographies
Synchronize media investments with campaign days that best resonate with the consumers
Target direct marketing and leaflet distribution to postal codes with the highest ROI

Concrete benefits for different roles in company

Marketing director

Holistic ROI-view of each media’s performance for incremental sales and margin
Understanding the sales value of brand marketing
Ability to recognize which products and marketing messages to include in each media

Commercial director

See which campaigns and new product launches increase the whole product category sales
Predictable sales for upcoming months when implementing media and campaign plan

Product group manager

See how products cannibalize each other inside a product group
Discover which product categories to promote to get the best traffic impact to online and offline