Supercharging Hotter Shoes’ customer experience strategy with Fresco segmentation

Hotter Shoes is the UK’s biggest footwear manufacturer. It’s a digitally led, omnichannel specialist footwear brand with a clearly defined, large and growing target audience.

Overlay abundant retail data with actionable demographics

Hotter already had a strong heritage in direct-to-consumer marketing when Stephen Shawcross, Senior Global CRM Manager, joined the company four years ago.

Stephen explains: “Like many retailers, we had an abundance of data but it was fragmented. Our first challenge was to bring all the data we had together. We created a true omnichannel single customer view (SCV) that included online, store and contact centre order data, footprint 3D scanning and augmented reality fitting data, web browsing data and email engagement data.

But the data was too insular and foot-centric – we had harnessed all the data about how our customers interact with Hotter but did not have a clear picture of the people behind the data. We wanted to overlay demographic data – we needed something more dynamic than a snapshot of our customer database demographics and a few customer profiles.

Fresco dataset and tools for individual customer mapping

CACI’s Fresco data stood out from the competition to offer the level of dynamic detail that Hotter needed. The CRM team was able to match 98% of consumers that order from Hotter to a CACI segment, at an individual customer level.

CACI’s consultant provided “amazing” support for Stephen and the team, with initial training and advice about data mapping and regular check-ins to make sure they have everything they need.

Stephen says, “The big appeal of Fresco was being able to map to an individual customer. A lot of profiling customer systems offer flat pen portraits but aren’t necessarily actionable. CACI matches a customer to a segment and means you can do something with it in real time. We immediately stepped up the level of personalisation beyond buying and browsing behaviour to supercharge our Customer Experience Strategy.”

Hyper-relevant marketing that directly fuels customer and sales growth

The combination of buying behaviour, digital engagement, foot-scan data and CACI demographics means Hotter Shoes’ marketing is hyper-relevant and offers true personalisation at scale.

Stephen explains:

At the highest level, we personalise based on CACI segment, recency, frequency, monetary value (RFM) commercial segmentation and channel preference across all customer touchpoints.

Hotter is able to create relevant, personalised website homepage images and messages and email content as well as Google pay per click ads, social media posts and direct mail. The profiling is specific and sophisticated – there are currently 27 different direct mail variants. We can prospect with social media marketing, finding and targeting lookalike audiences.

Hotter is also exploiting the Fresco data to support acquisition among new customer groups. Beyond their traditional market of customers aged 55+, the firm is looking to attract the next generation. Fresco segmentation is helping the team identify the most likely personas and to design messages, campaigns and products that will appeal to them.

Our relationship with CACI supports Hotter Shoes’ focus on driving marketing agility and delivering customer-centric, hyper-relevant shopping experiences,” says Stephen. “Consumers’ expectations are ever-increasing, and we are striving to provide our customers with communications that serve not just brand messages but also talk to them as individuals.

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