The Center for Business Analytics is pleased to recognize Anthropologie as an honoree of the 2023 Drexel LeBow Analytics 50 Awards. Read more about how Anthropologie used analytics to solve a business challenge.
Submitter
Ian Dewar, Senior Director of Customer Strategy; Elizabeth Diehl, Senior Manager, Analytics
Company
Anthropologie
Industry
Retail
Business Challenge
Anthropologie has always had a high percentage of repeat customers. For many years, the focus of marketing was retention, with a heavy emphasis on email and catalog as key tactics. This continued into the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic as the business focused on promoting the right products based on shifting purchase priorities while people worked from home. One key issue that expanded in this time was the high reliance on retaining active customers who were by default getting one year older every year. Anthropologie’s analytics team realized the average customer age was continuing to raise as the brand focused on retaining active customers. Recognizing the need to refill the customer funnel with new customers, Anthropologie began a deeper analysis of customer age and ways to focus customer acquisition on younger customers.
Analytics Solution
Using third party data, Anthropologie was able to match age data to both active and new customers every month. With increased access to customer age, the team divided customers into clusters based on age range and products purchased to understand where there was opportunity for increased penetration with younger customers. Using the foundational analysis, the team identified product groups with younger customer conversions. With this background data, the team created promotional tests with Meta to showcase key products to an audience under the age of 40 and an audience over the age of 40 to better understand cost per acquisition and product preference. By better understanding the under 40 customers’ path to purchase, Anthropologie was able to build acquisition tactics for that segment of customers.
Impact
The analytics team has now built a model to identify the number of customers under the age of 40 needed to lower the new customer age. The combination of background behavior and acquisition costs helped to forecast achievement of this goal via organic communication versus building an incremental acquisition campaign to build the new younger customer base. With increased understanding of the differences between customer behavior by age band, Anthropologie has now created specific marketing plans for under 40 versus over 40 and used customer data to better target existing customers and build acquisition campaigns for new ones.