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Guthy Renker

Traction helps Guthy-Renker to get more Proactiv

Guthy-Renker, a world leader in direct response television sales, has built a successful track record selling quality health and beauty products to home shoppers since they entered the Australian market in 1991.

The company’s flagship product is undoubtedly Proactiv® the number one selling acne management treatment in the USA with over 15 million customers. This world-famous Guthy-Renker skincare brand has also been a huge success in Australia and New Zealand.

With customer knowledge and after-sale service critical to its core business, the team at Guthy-Renker are always looking for ways to interact meaningfully with their customers.

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Making a meaningful recommendation

Katherine Mamontoff, E-Commerce Manager at Guthy-Renker turned to Traction (www.tractionplatform.com), a leading multi-channel relationship marketing tool that allows companies to track and report on its audience interactions, in order to increase sales.

“Many of our brands have valuable upsell and cross-sell opportunities available to us if we build our understanding of our customers and interact with them on a meaningful basis."

“We wanted to mine our customer data to find who had bought from only one of our brands and then target them with messages and promotions about complimentary products. Traction allowed us to do this easily and effectively by measuring the response to different mailings and customer groups.”

Engaging customers with the right message at the right time was key to making the most of the company’s valuable data. In this case, customers who had found the answer to acne with Proactiv were delivered a promotion for Sheer Cover, the company’s best-selling mineral make-up range.

Maximising the response

Mamontoff and her team created three mailings to help generate sales from the customer base. The emails were designed to build on the already existing relationship.

Mamontoff explained, “The Guthy-Renker business is a continuity business. Our Proactiv customers essentially subscribe to the products on a bi-monthly basis which is a reflection of the extraordinary value and quality of the range. So we place great importance on managing and improving the relationship with our long term customers.”

The Guthy-Renker team were looking to upgrade to a more comprehensive marketing platform that offered improved deliverability rates and more comprehensive reporting.

Using Traction, the targeted campaign delivered a return on investment of fifteen to one for Guthy-Renker achieving a high conversion rate. This resulted in many new subscription customers and an excellent marketing and financial result.

Continuing the engagement

Guthy-Renker is now planning to send regular database broadcasts and is able to gather more meaningful data on the way their customers interact with these communications.

Mamontoff is now working on some trigger-based campaigns to extend the value of Traction even further.

“We are looking at different ways to make the most of the capabilities of Traction and to tailor our messaging to customers in response to their behaviours. For example, we are looking at ‘win-back’ emails for those customers who decide to stop using a particular product, we are also looking to do surveys so we can make new recommendations based on user feedback.”

This personalisation is an important factor for Guthy-Renker’s target market.

Mamontoff said, “70 percent of direct response purchases are made by women, so the key to reaching that market base is creating trust from those likely buyers. Guthy-Renker does this on TV with trusted endorsements from some of the world’s largest personalities and we must follow through with our one-to-one customer communications. Traction allows us to do this.”

In a tight market, the digital communications solution that Traction provides has helped deliver excellent ROI to Guthy-Renker. Every communication with a customer is now used for effective cross-selling with targeted offerings. Furthermore, comprehensive tracking and reporting of all customer interactions allows Guthy-Renker to identify the sales impact of promotional emails and continually improve the performance of its marketing communications.