Customer Success Stories - DOUGLAS: How the international beauty retailer supercharged its promotion planning with data science

In the highly competitive beauty e-commerce market, promotions play a crucial role in attracting new and retaining old customers. This is why it was important for DOUGLAS to truly understand how promotions with varying discount depths performed against each other.

Highlights

• DOUGLAS was keen on strategizing promotions based on data science
  
• Sellforte’s Promotion Effectiveness solution enables the teasing out of the many promotions held each year, even those that are held concurrently
  
• Sellforte’s solution reveals the waterfall breakdown for different promotion mechanics and combinations, allowing DOUGLAS to track and find the most effective and profitable promotional strategies for Germany, Austria and Switzerland
  

Client Objectives

• Given the highly competitive beauty e-commerce market, promotions play a crucial role in attracting new and retaining old customers. This is why it was important for DOUGLAS to truly understand how promotions were driving incremental sales and margin and the factors behind successful campaigns
• One specific objective was the ability to compare different promotions, some of which have different mechanisms (e.g. minimum order value, duration of the campaign, % / absolute discount). This is done with the end goal of finding out the best and most profitable promotion combination

Sellforte's Approach

Sellforte Analytics decomposes sales and margin into the different detailed components for each promotion, such as cannibalization, halo and media costs.

A highly detailed analysis was done on the many different promotion types the customer had, resulting in insights and recommendations on which promotions to decrease and which to be leveraged on a greater scale, as well as spacing and duration.

Example Output

With rising inflation, margins are squeezed from all sides. Companies are under pressure to find answers to a myriad of questions - One that was particularly important to DOUGLAS, was to find out how e-commerce promotions with varying discount depths performed against each other.

Through our tool, DOUGLAS learned promotions with higher discounts were not only as profitable as shallower discounts, but they delivered much higher incremental sales, presenting itself as a stronger revenue generator.