A Winning Messaging Solution doubling ROI for Argos
A Little Background
Argos is one of the U.K. and Ireland’s leading home retailers, offering thousands of products, both in-store and online. From bedding to BBQs, jewelry to juicers, tents to telescopes, you name it, Argos probably sells it.
Argos is still synonymous with its physical catalog, a tome from which excitable children compile their list for Santa, adolescents earmark festival essentials and adults get everything they need for an upcoming house move. Today it’s also the hallmark of a true, and successful digital transformation, adeptly combining clicks and bricks, delighting its customers with a best-in-class website that is laser-focused on customer-experience; live stock levels, same-day delivery, and collection from any physical store.
Boasting over one billion website visitors per annum, the Argos website is the third most visited retail site in the UK and is complemented by a fully-fledged customer retention program, Argos Card, with its only loyalty initiative Argos Cards Rewards.
1BN website visits per month
29M yearly shop customers
850+ bricks-and-mortar stores
The Challenge
Once merely a U.S. phenomenon, Black Friday is now cemented in the U.K.’s retail landscape as the flagship e-commerce event. Brands large and small have joined this burgeoning event, seeking to get their products and deals in front of ever-more discount savvy consumers.
This festival of price cuts for consumers heralds the start of the holiday season and has triggered a paradigm shift in shopping behavior — and a potential bumper 24 hours for a brand’s yearly balance sheet.
The challenge for online retailers like Argos is delivering timely and accurate messaging, so when consumers fire-up their digital devices early on Black Friday morning, its brand is front-of-mind when they come to purchase. What’s more, with the plethora of deals and final product details being finalized merely hours before Black Friday itself, Argos would need an agile messaging platform that empowered it to quickly create and deploy flawless communications.
Enter Marigold Engage+ and its suite of tools that empower loyalty initiatives like Argos Card Rewards to rapidly deliver huge amounts of contextually relevant messages that convert.
The Brief
The Argos Card team approached Marigold Engage+ to help take its Black Friday messaging initiatives to the next level. Whilst the retailer has a high-converting website and an array of Black Friday deals, it needed a messaging strategy that went beyond traditional email blasts so it could stand-out in already crowded inboxes.
After a successful Black Friday in 2018, Argos challenged Marigold Engage+ to help it see an uptick in sales on the previous year’s activity. Concurrently, the retailer wanted to drive credit sales from existing customers — a key to ongoing business success.
The Solution: Marigold Engage+
As part of an approach to increase the effectiveness of its messaging, Argos worked closely with Marigold Engage+ in campaign conception, ensuring all supply dates were correct, scheduled accordingly, and all emails had gone through a full approval and QA process.
Including Black Friday itself, Argos delivered a total of 11 email sends, leveraging Marigold Engage+’s personalization, segmentation, and A/B testing capabilities to deliver both incentivized and non-incentivized messages, targeting a cross-section of customers across the Argos Card Rewards journey. A creative test was also conducted across three emails, testing content using specific products versus a more generic creative.
“Having on-hand support from Marigold Engage+ throughout was key to the success of our Black Friday sales period”
Argos Card Rewards
Marigold Engage+ implemented live text fields into email templates so that last-minute changes were possible for product and pricing information — imperative for a day where products might sell out, or if needed to respond to a competitor deal.
This improved process resulted in a vastly enhanced customer experience as details included in marketing matched the latest website updates. The Marigold Engage+ solution also made the creative process easier and improved internal stakeholders’ sign-off processes.
The Results:
Working in conjunction with Marigold Engage+ and having a strategy rooted in delivering contextually relevant messaging, Argos achieved the following results:
15% increase in year-on-year sales for Black Friday weekend
330% increase in profit for Black Friday weekend
180% ROI
45% reduction in year-on-year marketing costs
