Mu Sigma is the one of the world’s largest analytics firms. They help companies in harnessing Big Data for making data driven decision making. Data analytics and data driven decision making are an integral part of any complex business. Mu Sigma work with many leading organisations in solving business problems related to marketing, supply chain etc. They provide unique assistance in decision science with the aid of proven technologies, processes and experienced man power. Mu Sigma have great expertise with the experience in handling constantly changing business problems in various sectors like Retail, Pharma and Healthcare, IT, Media and telecom etc. With the advantage of having experience in more than ten business verticals and with a team of more than 3500 data scientists, Mu Sigma is one of the highly preferred analytics partner. Currently Mu Sigma serves more than 140 Fortune 500 companies in creating transforming decisions to take business to higher altitudes.
This is a case study about how Mu Sigma launched a successful loyalty program for a leading retailer in Pharma industry. This was one of the largest loyalty programs in the health and wellness industry. The Client of Mu Sigma was a Fortune 500 company based in US. The loyalty program was planned by the company to increase the Customer engagement.
Importance of Customer Engagement Marketing
- It has a great potential in increasing the sales.
- Customer Engagement Marketing is one of the greatest tools in increasing the brand loyalty.
- Helps in enhancing the reputation and image of the company
- The awareness among customers regarding products and services can be increased.
- Helps the company in understanding the customer requirements for providing better products and services.
This case study describes how Mu Sigma witnessed 1.5% in sales through Customer Engagement Marketing.
Major Challenges
Even though the client had a clear long term business plan, they never had any analytics framework to measure the performances and engagement of customers. Loyalty programs are not new to customers. Mu Sigma’s client never implemented any loyalty campaign before. So it was necessary to understand the loyalty campaign of their competitors at the first place. It was also necessary that the customer engagement was increased. In order to implement a unique and effective loyalty campaign Mu Sigma’s first step was to identify a test group. Creating innovative loyalty campaigns were necessary as the competitors were already offering discounts and other benefits to customers.
The Loyalty Program
The main objective for Mu Sigma was to create a loyalty program for their client that can create a platform for the better customer targeting. The more customer engagement can create more business. The whole process took a long duration of nearly eighteen months, which was carried out in three different phases.
Phase One – The performance of loyalty program had to be tested before the final launch. The key metrics were identified for the purpose. This included the total number of enrolments, the number of members using the loyalty benefits etc. The profiles of customers were categorised based on their age, location and other characteristics. They were divided into test group and a control group. The test group and control groups were generated for three variants.
Phase Two – The major loyalty programs that were set for testing were cash discount, coupon linked discounts, bonus points etc. The analysis of each test group was done for better insight to the performance of the loyalty programs. The following variables in the loyalty program were tested.
- Performance of pure cash discount against the coupon linked discounts.
- Performance of base points against the bonus points
- The redemption rate of loyalty program
- Response rate of different campaign programs
- Comparison of various offers with that of the competitors.
This phase involved integration of marketing, IT, finance and merchandising
Phase Three – In this phase the key features of the loyalty program, which was to be launched nationwide, was finalized. This was done based on the learning from the analysis of test group. The major inputs were the analysis of the drivers of satisfaction, lift analysis and the churn modelling. There was a continuous tracking of the various performance metrics. The various metrics were analysed and scaled. Apart from this Mu Sigma created various customer segments called a Unique Customer DNA framework. This included various channel potentials, response of different promotions, preferences of products etc. This helped for a better targeting of customers.
The Result
- The loyalty program that was launched by Mu Sigma is being running successfully for more than last three years. This has been recognized as a powerful platform for customer engagement and marketing, in the industry.
- There was a significant growth of sales by 1.5% after the nationwide launch of the loyalty program. Thus Mu Sigma witnessed 1.5% in sales through customer engagement marketing. Ten to fifteen percentage response rates were achieved in almost all the test groups.
- The response rates, sales lift and the rate of renewal maintained a level higher than that of the industry average. This growth was witnessed after the second phase of implementation.
Image Credit: Mu Sigma
