Case Study: Boosting Loyalty & Sales During a Pandemic

When one of Australia’s most recognised electronic wholesalers turned their focus to its loyalty program during the COVID pandemic, dotdigital helped them to not only grow their membership base but also boost sales.

With over 150 branches, Lawrence & Hanson (L&H) is Australia’s most recognised electrical wholesaler, supplying to customers across multiple market sectors, including residential, commercial, and industrial.

Despite physical branch closures during COVID lockdowns, the team set themselves an ambitious task of improving L&H’s loyalty program as a way to grow its membership base and sales.

The team built effective digital campaigns to drive customers online while rewarding their loyalty with benefits – just for spending with the business.

L&H created a new program every month, reviewing it monthly to make ongoing improvements. They built new and complex programs using multiple, personalised emails with a more strategic focus on customer contact data fields, as well as trigger and EDM campaigns.

There’s no better way to show customers that you value them than with a loyalty program. These intelligent automation programs incentivise and reward customers every time they come back to a brand,” said Aparna Gray, Head of Marketing, APAC, dotdigital. “Modern customers see their relationship with a brand as a two-way street. When they interact or make a purchase, they want something in return. So, in order to deliver experiences that inspire loyalty, it’s important to consider how you can reward customers.”

The team at L&H were impressed by the benefits of Engagement Cloud. They noted that one of the benefits is its access to real-time data on customer status in a particular program, and that with a complete and holistic view of programs, allowed the team to make necessary changes to maximise the ROI on campaigns.

By using clean and enriching customer data fields within the trigger campaigns, the retailer drove program sales and increased overall performance. As a result, Lawrence & Hanson no longer batches and blasts cold EDMs. What’s more, the team uses all the different channel elements of the platform for its national programs, such as personalised SMS, surveys and trigger campaigns, all personalised.

Most importantly, the brand developed a loyalty program in the dotdigital platform, optimising it every year, starting from a ‘Bucket List program’ in 2018 which incentivised customers to spend certain limits with specific suppliers, moving to this year’s program, the ‘Sparky Plus’ as an extension of the 2018 campaign.

The program is continuing to be successful month-on-month, boosting sales specifically from newcomers to the program who spent money with the business for the first time.

The significant sales performance highlights the long-term growth benefits of marketing automation – and just how much ROI it can bring.