Toolstation wanted to move its trade customers from a much-loved but costly catalogue mailing to an under-utilised website that offered a broader range of products and more cost-efficient sales. The company worked with customer engagement agency Havas CX helia to develop hyper-personalised QR codes based around customers’ most frequently shopped departments, with users sent direct mail packs containing relevant QR codes as workstation stickers. The codes took customers directly to their most relevant departments online. The ‘My Toolstation’ campaign delivered a 10% increase in online traffic and a 9% increase in sales frequency, with revenue per customer up 14%.

Toolstation’s business was founded on its quarterly product catalogue which had become a ‘workman’s bible’. However, the catalogue’s 17,000 products, from 21 departments, shown over 800 pages, did not provide customers with an easy path to purchase. After using the catalogue, customers then either had to go to a store or head online to buy it, not knowing whether the item was in stock.

From a business point of view, the catalogue was expensive to produce and offered limited opportunities to learn about customer purchase behaviour. However, the Toolstation website allowed customers to check on stock availability and delivery options and refer to saved searches.

Havas was tasked with increasing customer visits to the Toolstation website.

As the objective was to change customer behaviour, the strategy was to devise a campaign that tapped into existing, offline behaviour to allow customers to experience the website, rather than just being told about its benefits. The campaign needed to provide an online experience that was as relevant as the customer’s offline, catalogue experience, while retaining an element of the direct mail communication to which the customer was loyal.

Analysed transactions across 20,000 products in 21 categories identified six core categories per customer. This data was used to produce a targeting model based on customers’ actual and predicted behaviour.

The model formed the basis of 143,000 personalised versions of a four-page direct mailing to customers containing six QR codes. The QR codes directed customers to their relevant online departments. In addition, the QR code pack was personalised to the recipient – for example, ‘John’s Toolstation’ – to make it feel as relevant and familiar as the catalogue.

The customer mailing comprised heavy-duty stickers of the QR codes to attach to toolboxes, workbenches or dashboards, under the creative, ‘Turn anything into your Toolstation’. To make the QR codes more engaging, their design showed at-a-glance frequently shopped products rather than the usual QR pixels.

• 10% increase in online traffic
• 9% increase in sales frequency
• 5% increase in average order value
• 14% more revenue per customer
• The pack cost 75% less to produce than the catalogue, which resulted in seven figure savings and a 3:1 ROI

• DMA Awards – Gold (B2B)
• BIMA Awards – Silver (B2B)