Case Study

How Tapestry helped Museum Selection boost customer engagement to optimise its marketing budget

Museum Selection launched in 2002, offering seasonal collections of home accessories and furniture, clothing, jewellery, cards and gifts. Products are inspired from 2,000 years of art and history and today. The brand works with leading museums and galleries, including the V&A and The British Library, to develop high-quality lifestyle items and gifts. The company also owns successful subsidiary brands Culture Vulture and Pia Jewellery.

In the last quarter of 2019, Museum Selection started working with Tapestry to analyse the performance of its marketing strategy across traditional and digital channels, to improve customer engagement and support further business growth.

Museum Selection is a traditional business, with proven success in reaching customers via press advertising and catalogues – distributing 21 million each year through direct mail and magazine inserts. But it is also forward-looking and increasingly digital. To achieve their growth plans, Museum Selection asked Tapestry to take a closer look at customer behaviour, validate existing use of digital channels and help the company develop a data-driven marketing strategy that recruits and retains customers more effectively.

Forecasting customer behaviour

2020 presented unforeseen challenges for many businesses, including a rapid rate of growth for Museum Selection. As a result, Tapestry’s priority was to understand how customer behaviour was changing across various marketing channels and help Museum Selection manage its growth and marketing budgets in these unprecedented trading conditions.

Tapestry started by building a customer growth forecast model to segment Museum Selection’s existing customers by their spend and identify how they move between segments over time. Using the model as a basis for the coming year’s marketing activity, it is now possible for the brand to predict database revenue. Museum Selection is also able to forecast different scenarios if aspects of the marketing strategy change – for example, if they decide to boost their lapsing customer programme to improve retention.

Understanding Digital Engagement

Focusing on ways to make the marketing spend work harder, Tapestry examined how Museum Selection’s customers engage with the business, and through which channels. They used this information to segment customers by their engagement habits, which has already enabled significant savings. For example, the analysis showed that 50% of digitally engaged customers could be excluded from a Culture Vulture remail mailing without any drop in revenue. The same testing is now being carried out for Museum Selection and Pia.

With a goal of becoming increasingly digital, Museum Selection worked with a digital advertising partner that measured the reach and performance of digital display advertising spend in terms of ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). Tapestry used its own analysis and matrix measurement to validate those findings and proved that that Museum Selection’s digital ad spend provides incremental ROAS that is above that of much of the offline media.

Tapestry built a channel matrix tool and attribution model to show Museum Selection how its various channel measures intersect, to build a better understanding of the real value of each marketing channel, and to quantify the return on investment that each provides. To understand the value of pay-per-click advertising, Tapestry set up a series of channel incrementality tests to explore what happened when pay-per-click advertising was paused in different locations. The findings revealed a drop in demand across the test regions, with a significant drop in orders from new customers, a small drop in order from existing customers and interestingly, a drop in overall demand across other channels too. Armed with evidence of the specific value of pay-per-click to drive orders, Museum Selection can now confidently allocate more of its ad spend to this channel.

A data-driven plan for growth

In 2020 and the first part of 2021 – a period when many businesses had to tear up their marketing strategies – Museum Selection was able to make just the right tweaks to achieve record growth. Today, using the customer forecast model, Museum Selection can make data-driven plans, predicting customer behaviour to continue its path to expansion and set realistic marketing budgets to achieve it.

 “Tapestry helped us identify where we were under-investing to recruit new customers and predicting too-high returns on core customers based on past performance. Through Tapestry’s data analysis and recommendations, we now have a strong forecasting model to keep us on track”, says Museum Selection MD Tracey Putt.

“In the past, we relied on manual spreadsheets to build from the bottom up. Tapestry’s model allows us to cross-check these bottom-up campaign based forecasts with accurate top-down customer based forecasts.”