Advalo as seen by Thierry Lernon, BUT General Manager E-Commerce & Digital

“Creating lasting and successful relationships with our clients”

Thierry Lernon, But General Manager E-commerce & Digital

In an interview with DigitalMag, in a special edition Les Big Boss, Thierry Lernon speaks about the collaboration between BUT and Advalo, and the reasons why he decided to work with the platform.

What is But ?
“With a total revenue of 1.8 billion and 350 stores, BUT is the 3rd largest household equipment brand in France, second to IKEA and essentially at the same overall performing level as Castorama. A local player, its network is the densest and the closest to consumers, enabling it to continuously increase its market shares.”

What were some of the requirements you were seeking when you called upon Advalo ?
“With 70 million online visits and 40 million on-site sales, our major challenge was to be able to reconcile the data of our in-store customers with the visits on our website in order to have an understanding of the customer journey and an omnichannel vision of our activities.

“Furniture purchases are often the result of a global reflexion (for example the purchase of a sofa will often cause someone to change their coffee table or carpet), therefore the many digital traces left by the customer have to be processed and analyzed to better identify the many needs of our customers and in order to send them a targeted and individualized message. This allows us to detect key buying moments rather than forcing more standardized sales initiatives. In other words, we wanted to enter into a real relationship of trust with our customers. “

Why choose Advalo ?

«We favored the approach of Advalo teams for their expertise and pragmatism in activating our marketing campaigns»

“We met with major players in the sector, and most of them put forward the technical aspect, which is often complex. But we wanted to pursue the client oriented relational marketing approach compared to the tool itself. Advalo was able to understand our issues, and define models and estimate the value that we could realize. They quickly set up a POC. Six months later we established very simple use cases with convincing results and validated this approach. “

How did Advalo respond to your potential problematic issues ?
“By pragmatism in their approach and a simple technique that develops an ability to effectively pass from theory to practice. In other words, they provided a marketing response with a technical undercurrent that was not a constraint.”

Because the stakes were high. We wanted to tackle 3 main issues :

1/ Measure the impact of the website and digital activities on store sals

2/ Increase ability to speak with customers 

3/ Optimize acquisition costs, while building a consistent customer journey, throughout the entire purchasing process

What were the results ?
“We have seen that 60% of store sales are influenced by one or more visits to our sites.  We were able to quantify the impact of the web on in-store sales. In addition, thanks to Advalo, we have the ability today to reach more customers: We were able to increase customer contactability 5 times over, knowing that 63% of our customers base are not contactable by email. We can now reach them on all the channels on which they are located, whether it be search, social networks, on site… and in a personalized and individualized way.

Our traffic acquisition, marketing and social network teams had to work together to activate relational digital campaigns with visible results quickly: these actions generated an incremental turnover of over 1% in 6 months.”

Why recommend Advalo ?
“For all that we have just previously mentioned : Advalo has an ability to focus on 2-3 testable and uncomplicated ideas to implement, allowing it to be quickly, easily, and thoroughly analyzed. It was the same with our teams who apprehended the logic, mechanics and tools very quickly”

The figure to remember ?
Incremental turnover generated :  +1% of overall BUT turnover