3 KEY STATS

CUSTOMER STRATEGY

GEORGIA-PACIFIC: PROJECT EVERGREEN

WE BUILT THE IRON MAN OF EMAIL PROGRAMS

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Georgia Pacific’s seven brands of paper products are in millions of homes across America. By 2014, GP had amassed a sizeable email list, but lacked both a clear messaging strategy and the internal bandwidth to manage one. We worked with GP and their internal creative agency, Pixel, to build a fully automated email program that ultimately drives more engagement, offers more value to customers, speaks to customers in a cohesive brand voice, and dramatically cuts back on both time and cost for GP.

TECHNOLOGIES

CHALLENGE

From 2014-2017, Georgia Pacific emailed high-value coupons from across their portfolio of brands to their entire email list every 30 to 60 days. Then, they realized that not only were they giving away way too much free stuff, but customers had stopped responding as strongly — by 2017, open rates and click-throughs had dropped by half, even though GP was spending 40-80 hours and thousands of dollars per month to maintain the program. (Talk about salt in the wound.) Rather than treating the email list as a monolith, we ran a series of experiments on subscribers, analyzed their behavior, and used the data to build an email program that delivers precisely targeted offers and consistent messaging to each customer based on their engagement. Oh, and did we mention Project Evergreen runs and manages all of this by itself?

INSIGHTS

Flinging coupons at customers with reckless abandon is expensive and can only go so far. (Not very far, as it turns out.) A customer who always redeems a coupon will always redeem a coupon, whether it’s $1.75 or $1. So, why not offer them $1 instead, and spend more money incentivizing the inactive or lapsed customers whose habits we want to change? We knew that perceived scarcity would drive non-redeemers to redeem. Take away someone’s cookie (or, in this scenario, their $1.50 toilet paper coupon), and they’ll want it even more. Dangle another cookie in front of them next time, and they’ll snatch it up.  

APPROACH

We tackled this by rooting our messaging in human behavior and data science, while focusing on strategy that would ultimately benefit the business (namely, saving precious time and money). After lots of experimenting and versioning, we studied the habits of GP’s customers: habitual redeemers, active audience members, and inactive audience members. Based on those patterns, we developed a framework where the email frequency and coupon value reflected, and motivated, the action we wanted each customer to take. As audience members shift from inactive to active, and from active to redeemers, the machine is constantly adjusting and reconfiguring its messaging, offering, and frequency appropriately. (It’s basically a living Rube Goldberg machine.) We also knew that GP’s previous emails lacked a distinctive tone for the portfolio itself, so we worked with GP’s internal creative agency, Pixel, to define a consistent, cohesive portfolio voice for the very first time.

OUTCOME

GP went from spending 40-80 hours a month on email to barely having to lift a finger, all while saving about 50% in monthly coupon costs. Engagement across the board has spiked and remained high. Inactive customers now have a one-in-three chance of shifting into the active group. In plain English, Project Evergreen is crushing it. How It Affected Customer Experience and/or Business

EXPERIENCE

Before, GP’s emails to customers lacked a cohesive voice and were treated as a one-size-fits-all for their entire list. Now, every GP customer is getting an email distinctly tailored to their level of engagement. The flow of information is more predictable, the voice sounds more human, and the coupons are getting redeemed more, which means we’re bringing even more real value to more households.

IBM WATSON MARKETING

SQL DATABASE

MICROSOFT SSIS

CAPABILITIES

MARKETING SCIENCE

CUSTOMER STRATEGY

EMAIL AUTOMATION

CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT

NERD OUT WITH US

+