How Dunelm transformed disconnected customer data, into ‘targeted gold dust’

Challenge:

Dunelm needed to unify their disparate ‘owned’ first-party data on a single platform and make it actionable.

Solution:

Dunelm chose the Tealium Customer Data Platform (CDP) to fix an omnichannel data disconnect and unify its customer data onto a single platform. Leveraging a CDP has given Dunelm an ‘out of the box’ and user-friendly solution that has been rolled out across the business which enabled Dunelm to deliver behaviour-led campaigns and drive purchase frequency.

Results:

The ability to leverage Tealium AudienceStream has been crucial in Dunelm being able to deliver a number of behaviour-led campaigns. Dunelm is now able to match over twice as many users who abandon baskets, seeing a conversion uplift of +15%. 

Another successful result seen by Dunelm is the campaign ‘Favourite Category’, which dictates content within Dunelm’s ‘Welcome Journey’ for new contacts. Being able to personalise with the use of unified first-party data has led to:

• +7% click through uplift
• +23% conversion rate uplift

How did it work?

Founded in 1979, Dunelm is the UK’s market leader in homewares retail with 177 stores across the country and a thriving online business. Dunelm has been resilient in a challenging retail market, achieving sustained growth, 85% of which was attributed to market share gains in 2022.

Driven by Dunelm’s digital investment strategy and a need to achieve incremental growth online and in-store, the retailer saw an opportunity to boost frequency and turn views across different channels into actionable insights.

How? By raising Dunelm’s first-party data game.

Historically, Dunelm had struggled to activate ‘owned’ customer data. First-party data existed in silos across multiple platforms. Dunelm lacked the capabilities of a CDP, which made enabling customer data through its previous stack clunky, inflexible, and expensive.

Fixing this disconnect and unifying data onto a single platform was a progressive step in Dunelm’s digital transformation and data-driven marketing journey. Although this is an ongoing journey, the ability to consolidate disparate sources of data has enabled Dunelm to target customers, personalise and improve CX in ways that would not have been previously possible. 

Dunelm recognised that it’s existing CRM lacked the functionality to activate customer data and unlock more targeted data-driven marketing opportunities and needed an ‘out of the box’, user-friendly solution, selecting Tealium AudienceStream to consolidate its disparate sources of data.

Throughout the process, Dunelm sought a strategic partner who could provide the technology and expertise needed to fuel an overhaul of the retailer’s customer data strategy and digital marketing stack. Like most things in life, you get out what you put in and Dunelm’s shift to leveraging a CDP was no exception. 

Ensuring a smooth transition necessitated a major data cleaning and segmentation project, creating a high-quality dataset that would help to unleash the full power of the platform.

Darren Short, Senior CRM Manager at Dunelm, said, “Tealium succeeds where many solution providers fall flat – matching a powerful platform with trusted people who will support us at every step of our customer data journey. 

Whilst Dunelm is the UK’s homeware market leader, we felt we could unlock more growth by improving our customer data architecture. Prior to introducing Tealium’s CDP, our customer data was fragmented and held across multiple platforms. This made enabling customer data a clunky, inefficient and self-limiting workaround that really didn’t cut the mustard in the competitive world of omnichannel retail.” 

With Tealium’s support, previously fragmented sources of data now exist on a single platform, and are a contributing factor in boosting efficiency, conversions, and frequency, whilst reducing churn and abandoned baskets.

As the saying goes, the first step is always the hardest. Rolling out a CDP has given Dunelm the springboard to address its first-party data and data-driven marketing ambitions. It has also been an important step in Dunelm’s digital transformation strategy, helping to future-proof the business in a competitive market and tap into new opportunities for personalisation, innovations in customer experience, and first-party data enrichment.

Through our partnership with Tealium, we’ve seen an impressive uplift in frequency, efficiency and effectiveness by being able to quickly deploy more targeted communications. We’ve matured as a business, testing, learning and implementing as we go. Crucially we now have the data engine needed to propel Dunelm’s digital transformation drive.

Darren Short, Senior CRM Manager, Dunelm

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