Despite all the promotions and deals Office Depot, an $11 billion retailer, had been providing to its large customer base through its award-winning e-commerce site, there was a disconnect between these online promotions and in-store sales. When considering this lag, Office Depot noted from a study that “80 percent of consumers worldwide say they will only engage with a brand’s marketing offers if those offers are based on how they previously interacted with the brand.”
To improve ROI across all channels, the brand recognized it needed to create a method to seamlessly engage with its customers across devices to help provide relevant and consistent content, as well as to harvest data for a better understanding of customer behavior and purchasing patterns.
What Office Depot needed was an omni-channel people-based marketing approach.
Last week, I joined Adam Lavelle, our Chief Solutions Officer, and James Daugherty, Sr. Digital Marketing Manager at Office Depot, for a webinar to discuss the successful digital transformation the company underwent with the help of Merkle to reach high-value customers, in addition to the value that people-based marketing can add to a business.
The challenge for Office Depot was to go from channel-centric digital marketing approach to a customer-centric one. A shift like this requires an organizational cultural change for the company. With the assistance of Merkle, the transformation focused on a new data strategy using DoubleClick and M1 — Dentsu Aegis Network’s 100% people-based insights, planning, activation, and measurement platform — to improve its CRM and reach high- value customers. Additionally, they evolved messaging to make the addressable experiences more dynamic and personal.
The changes resulted in a tremendous increase in CTR and ROI. These outcomes and the continued relationship between Office Depot and Merkle highlight the core premise of Merkle’s 2017 Marketing Imperatives when it comes to digital marketing: Make advertising more addressable, make experiences more addressable, and manage customer relationships over time through continuous optimization.
For more details on how Office Depot and Merkle achieved that digital transformation, and to hear upcoming plans for Q3, watch our webinar with AdWeek on demand: How Office Depot Reaches High-Value Customers: Addressable Media for People-Based Marketing
