Ashton Media
Marketing & Customer Experience Hub

Using segmentation and customer behaviour to improve experience

Customer service wine

In April, 2014, more than 150 customer experience, data, marketing and business leaders participated in the first Customer 360 Symposium run by  Ashton Media.

This is the second of three posts based on a presentation given by  Paul Smitton, Executive Manager Customer Engagement at  Qantas Loyalty,  who talked about how Qantas created diverse and authentic customer experiences that linked back to their core travel offering.

In the previous post Paul shared how Qantas created experiences that mattered to their customers.

Customer service wine

Operating through customer segmentation

The key thing about the way we operate is through segmentation. Through understanding our customers, we now know what they like, so we’ve been able to understand what sort of products they find interesting, and this is the mix across the different groups.

By understanding what’s interesting to them, we’re able to then target them with the relevant communications. So whether it’s mixed cases and telling them about those wonderful inflight products and giving them a nice selection, or whether it’s specific things they’re looking for.

We have a lot of customers who love the fact that we know they like quality reds so we can send them specific products like that. We also know that there are a lot of customers who like to just buy things like champagne at Christmas. At Christmas, we sell over a million dollars of Moet, for example, as a regular sort of thing. That’s great too because that’s what customers really like and value getting.

We’re also just about to send a newsletter offer which is going out tomorrow. It’s a great opportunity to buy Taittinger for Easter which is another neat promotion that’s coming up.

Grouping our offerings around customer behaviour

We’ve also been looking at our base and asking how do they group?

The segmentation has been interesting.  We’ve found that there are four major groupings around customer behaviour.

We have our big spenders who love to go in there regularly and buy the premium wine that we serve so we have the lovely back stock of old Grange going back to 1968. There are some wonderful products there that customers like to go and discover and buy.

They tend to get 63% average open rates on those emails, 24% click rates, so really high engagement, which is fantastic. Even down to the other groups, the price seekers, we get 51% open rates, 12% click rates, so that’s driving really strong engagement into a new territory that we now have the right to play in.

This then links back to deeper engagement in the core program as well.  We also find that we consistently get a 5% e-commerce conversion rate too. So that’s pretty strong, from all the traffic that’s coming to the site.

A couple of quick stats

The $39, 272 that was the biggest single transaction – someone coming in and buying wine in one go. So that was not bad. We also had one customer jump in and spend 1.2 million points in one transaction buying some wine for their cellar. And then the most expensive individual bottle we sold recently was a $1363 bottle of 2007 Grange, a magnum.

So there are some pretty high value consumers in this group as you can tell by those numbers. They’re not all like that but there are some interesting consumers in that group.

Let’s make sure when you get this, it’s going to be good

We also find that a lot of our customers are really time poor so trying to make it easy for them is a really important part of what we do. We’ve just launched a thing called wine plans which are a great way to just set and forget. You opt in to buying these different wine plans, you pick the one you want and then it gets sent to you on a quarterly basis.

One of the most popular ones is the first class reds that we have here. Customers really find that valuable because what it means is that Tom Carson, Vania Cullen, Steve Pannel, the highly respected wine makers are selecting those wines and you know you’re not going to be disappointed. You’re going to get these products and they’re going to be good which is quite different to a lot of the traditional wine plans you see in the markets.

That’s where we try to be different. We say, let’s make sure when you get this sent to your home, it’s going to be good, you’re not going to be disappointed, which is key to the core Qantas proposition as well as around quality.

In the next and final post of this series, Paul talks about  how Qantas deepened ongoing engagement with their customers.

Check out the full video here:

Mark Abay - Content Director, Ashton Media About Mark Abay - Content Director, Ashton Media
Mark is Content Director at Ashton Media. It's his job to create interesting and engaging conference programs that stretch the thinking of our attendees. Mark works closely with our industry advisors to ensure the conference content is aligned with the needs and interests of our audiences.