Castorama is evolving from product-oriented marketing to relationship marketing

Today, the customer and their needs are at the center of the brand’s thinking and this will be even more true in the future.

Philippe Deschodt, Data and CRM Manager on the customer marketing team of the well-known French brand Castorama (part of the british DIYgroup, Kingfisher), shares secrets to their success and their digital marketing vision at a time when consumer habits are constantly evolving.

About

Castorama is one of those established brands that the French have always known about since it was created in 1969 with the aim of bringing together all the elements for interior design under one roof. Today, Castorama has 92 stores spread throughout France and sees 3 billion in turnover. Recently, it has sought to diversify its distribution methods with an e-commerce site that has grown in popularity and they want to adapt to future customer purchasing patterns.

“Change makes us move forward”: A tailor-made customer experience

This is much more than a baseline for Castorama’s digital and CRM teams. It is a daily driving purpose to offer their customers support as they make changes to their spaces , in a positive and responsible manner.

But above all, the Castorama teams understand that to be able to better serve their customers, they have to know them. This is why they have embarked on the redesign of their customer data platform in order to be able to read all the signals, or insights, left by consumers, whether they are in-store signals, their visit, their order, their various purchases, but also everything they can do digitally.

“We have been working in collaboration with Marigold Engage+ for more than seven years now, which explains this longevity is first of all the close support that we can have with the Cheetah teams, and their responsiveness to our problems.”

The customer data platform allows the storage of data and thus enriches the various systems. This data is what feeds Marigold Engage+, their messaging solution, in order to be able to send the message most suited to the relevant moments of the customer’s life and according to their expectations. Beyond technology, the Castorama teams have also set up a community where they can bounce ideas off of customers and get their feedback who are very supportive and who are truly integrated into the development of new offers.

Clear and transparent communication for each client

Another issue that is very important for Castorama is being able to communicate in the most transparent and clear way possible with their clients. They have therefore increased their engagement and this requires them to collect personal contact information on the one hand, but also to acquire consent. And for that, it is important to be as transparent as possible about the how this data will be used and to allow customers to be able to choose only to be contacted for the content that interests them.

Omnichannel marketing campaigns and relational marketing

Today Castorama sends approximately 180 million emails per year with Marigold Engage+. Their campaign types adapt to each customer profile. Of course, within the promotional campaigns, historic products still exist but they emphasize project campaigns, more inspiring campaigns, and relationships in order to develop their relationship marketing. Automation and triggers also help build this close relationship with customers by sending messages the moment the signal is left by the customer.

Philippe Deschodt also shared with us that, according to him, e-mail is and will remain an essential channel for creating proximity and being able to communicate effectively and segmented with their customers. But email alone is no longer enough and we need to be able to mix it with all the channels used by our customers. The SMS comes not to replace, but to supplement according to the customer’s moment of life and according to the message and the objectives which have been set. Each campaign is duplicated on their different channels (e-mail, SMS, Push notification) but with their own objectives.

Zero-Party Data: buzzword or indispensable in the future?

We will have to prepare for a cookie-free world, where customer data will be more and more difficult to collect. Each brand will have to strengthen its own customer knowledge by other means. Zero-party data falls completely within this objective. The idea is to give customers the opportunity to provide the information that’s relevant to them at the appropriate time. In this respect, Philippe Deschodt says he is “seduced by the Cheetah Experience solutions” which falls totally within this framework, which offers customers different personalized experiences in which they will be invited to provide information about them in a way that is totally transparent and voluntary. It is therefore essential in the communications of the future.

“One point that was very important for us was to be able to connect Marigold Engage+ with our system, our data lake […] to allow us to be much more relevant but also to be able to collect feedback from Cheetah in order to enrich our own knowledge of our customer base.”

180 million emails send per year

40% conversion rate

7 years of partnership with Cheetah