The Container Store wants to get a better handle on its first-party customer data.
The Container Store aims for personalized content that leads to deeper engagement and more conversions, according to Tory Marpe, The Container Store’s VP of loyalty. Enhancing its customer communications could help the home organization and storage retailer achieve its ambitious goals of doubling its revenue to $2 billion and expanding its brick-and-mortar footprint by more than 70 stores over the coming years.
So The Container Store decided it needed a customer data platform (CDP). The company chose Epsilon’s self-service digital CDP for enterprise clients, which launched in March, following more than a decade of first-party data-related partnerships with the Publicis-owned agency. The CDP is “a natural extension of that [relationship],” Marpe said.
After the retailer tests the CDP, it plans to be live by the end of the year. One of its key objectives is to use the CDP to identify its website visitors and deliver personalized experiences to them.
Who you are, where you’re from, what you did
Epsilon supplements The Customer Store’s data, “helping us paint a picture of who they are outside of our store and outside of transactions,” Marpe said.
“How did they get to us? Where do they go from us? What is it they’re looking for?” Marpe said. “Could we introduce customers who come in for one particular product category into a secondary category that also fits within the needs of their life?”
For instance, if a visitor to The Container Store website spends a lot of time with its closet and storage space design tool, the retailer can send an email about the process. And if the visitor engages with the content, the retailer can follow up via email with a discount.
Though The Container Store’s customers traditionally skew toward female, higher-income homeowners between the millennial and baby boomer age segments, it considers anyone who wants to organize or store their items – for instance, college students seeking to personalize their dorm rooms – as part of its customer base.
“We don’t want to go out in the marketplace with the same offer for everyone,” Marpe said. “If we’re going to go out to a person, we want it to be a relevant, personalized communication.”
Data diaries
Previously, The Container Store’s data lived “all over the place within their ecosystem,” split up into multiple legacy data warehouses that didn’t provide a clear single view of the customer, said David Melnick, Epsilon’s managing director of data platforms.
Epsilon’s CDP assembles data from The Container Store’s in-store point-of-sale systems, ecommerce transaction systems, website, digital media and surveys. It brings together data on site traffic and engagement, purchases, returns and exchanges, warranties, and customer permissions and preferences into one centralized place.
Then, that first-party data is further enriched with Epsilon’s demographic, psychographic, contextual browsing, behavioral and consumer profile information about individuals and households, according to Melnick. Epsilon creates an identity graph based on what it calls a Core ID, an identity solution that associates consumers with their digital attributes and behaviors.
The platform is preloaded with a curated, retail-specific subset of its thousands of customer attributes, making it easier for The Container Store to start using the data right away, Melnick said.
Data privacy and compliance are key considerations for Epsilon, given that it manages hundreds of petabytes of customer data for health care, pharmaceutical and financial services companies. Epsilon’s CDP embeds rules and regulations within the technology, such as ensuring that explicit permissions are in place for opt-ins and opt-outs and giving customers the right to access or delete their data. “It is literally like our blood within Epsilon,” Melnick said.
Once the CDP is in place, The Container Store will dig into the omnichannel customer journey for richer information about customers’ online experience, Marpe said. “Those insights will help us better tailor how we communicate, what we communicate and when we communicate.”
