[INTERVIEW CLIENT] Advalo as seen by Grain de Malice : First hand experiences from CRM Manager Laurent Bacquaert and Customer Marketing Manager Marion Landry

Read this article to learn more about the collaboration between Advalo and ready to wear woman’s brand Grain de Malice from CRM Manager Laurent Bacquaert, and  Customer Marketing Manager Marion Landry.

Could you tell us about Grain de Malice ?

Grain de Malice is a French ready to wear female clothing brand that offers comfortable products suitable to active women who are 35 years and up. The brand caters to all silhouettes ranging from sizes 36 to 48.

Grain de Malice mission is to advise and accompany all women, by creating a special bond which empowers them to make the most of their unique beauty potential.

Grain de Malice has 500 members of staff spread over 160 stores in France and Belgium. 

What were your challenges when you contacted Advalo ?

In 2016 we experienced a difficult Redundancy Plan and we needed to prove the value and the importance of the  role of our e-commerce site on the results of our physical stores, as well as it’s involvement in our customers’ shopping journey.

We wanted to increase customer proximity by capitalizing on a better understanding of the purchasing process and as a result appropriately personalize our digital communications. 

Finally, we wanted to recrute new clients exhibiting strong potential.

Why Advalo ?

We chose Advalo for 3 reasons :

• for their responsive and available teams and simple to use platform that was ideally suited for our business which has a relatively small CRM team.
• their rapidity in response to the needs of increasingly demanding customers and our needs to assert ourselves as a ready-to-wear women’s clothing brand in this highly competitive market.
• their expertise and marketing support that adapted to our needs and allowed us to differentiate ourselves from other ready-to-wear players.

How did Advalo answer your problems ?

Through the digitalization of our database and reconciliation of customers offline purchases and online behavioral data. Advalo enabled us to answer our first challenge: enhance the impact of our e-commerce site on the customer journey.

As a result, we were able to see that 39% of in-store sales were preceded by site visits taking place on average 7 days before purchase.

This data allowed us to  :

• demonstrate how the customer journey is omnichannel 
• ensure stores adhere to our digital initiatives and more importantly client data collection from checkout

As a result Advalo assisted us in the identification and implementation of use cases that were very successful and improved retention and purchase frequency. We also noted that our
assessment matrices improved from season to season.

For our customers who stated they received too many emails a day/per week, we worked together to relieve this marketing pressure and developed a more personalized newsletter with relevant advice and content. 

Finally, Advalo allowed us to establish qualified acquisition based on our best customers look-a-likes.

What was the outcome ?

We now include product customization in our emails, and personalized targeting based on our
customers’ interests, has significantly increased our open and click-through rates.

We also increased points of contact and can animate customers who are not optin emails or SMS. Thanks to Facebook and Adwords : we can now address 60% of our customer base with all the levers compared to the 10% only reachable by email.

Thanks to the implementation of look-a-likes we divided our acquisition costs by 3.(based on the behavior of our best customers.)

These cumulative actions allowed us to increase turnover by +2% over the year, ROI amounted to 1€ invested = 18€ profit margin !

Why recommend Advalo ?

For all the elements mentioned above, and what we appreciate most are the close-knit teams.

It wasn’t the platform that was made available to us, but the people who helped us, who listened to us, who were reactive. We worked together on use cases to best meet the needs of our customers. Moreover, Advalo knows how to adapt to our strategy, our roadmap, to help us get where we want.

A figure to remember ?

An incremental turnover of 1.7 million euros on targeted customers via Advalo versus
non-targeted customers, representing a 2% increase in turnover. For the first time in Grain de Malice history, we were profitable in the year 2018.

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For more details, Read the Grain de Malice case study