El Corte Inglés boosts revenue with first-party data activation

What El Corte Inglés Wanted

El Corte Inglés is Europe’s largest department store group and ranks third globally. The retailer has a massive offline and online presence, aided by its wide range of product offerings. From groceries to luxury products, El Corte Inglés attracts droves of diverse shoppers, each with different needs and spending habits. 

This diversity in buyers presented a challenge when it came to the European retailer’s customer targeting. The Portuguese branch of El Corte Inglés specifically wanted improved insight into their vast and varied shoppers, but they also had to unify data from both offline and online spending. 

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The Challenge 

El Corte Inglés’ main priorities included customer targeting and audience segmentation. Specifically, they wanted the ability to segment large audiences by narrower characteristics like category, brand, or time of purchase. 

“Segmentation is the base of digital marketing,” said Judit Takács Miranda, Head of Digital Marketing at El Corte Inglés’ Portuguese branch. “You can have the best designers, the best copywriters -- but if you have the wrong audience segments, it won’t work.” 

While both Google and Meta offer first-party data integration options, El Corte Inglés wanted a more flexible and future-proof solution. 

“We needed a good CDP platform to focus on first-party data,” Takács Miranda said. “That type of audience segmentation isn’t possible with just the Meta pixel.”

Takács Miranda elaborated that the “direct upload” method of Google and Meta’s first-party data solutions presented concerns for El Corte Inglés’ legal team. Moreover, they wanted a CDP that offered more than just the bare minimum. 

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The Solution

Today, Kevel Audience helps El Corte Inglés ship audience segments for use across Meta, Google, and Pinterest. While segmentation was at the forefront of El Corte Inglés’ priorities when partnering with Audience, other features have helped the retailer boost conversion rates 3x more when compared to remarketing segments previously used in Meta.

“The department chain can run more effective marketing campaigns,” Takács Miranda said, sharing how since streamlining their remarketing audiences, El Corte Inglés’ has been able to shift energy toward priorities like new customer acquisition and retention.

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El Corte Inglés upgrades their segmentation with predictive audiences 

Kevel Audience’s machine-learning predictive model helps El Corte Inglés identify and target users with a Likelihood to Buy model. Kevel’s predictive model has helped El Corte Inglés: 

• Integrate offline and online data. This means more holistic insight into buyers’ spending habits and the ability to monitor spending trends like shifts between online and offline spending.
• Meet specific campaign needs. Rather than segmenting campaigns generally, El Corte Inglés can identify and target likely-to-buy users in specific categories, such as likely-to-buy tech, home decor, fashion, non-food items, or supermarket items. ‍
• Identify customers on the cusp of converting. Kevel’s predictive model considers characteristics like purchase frequency for different verticals.

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“Predictive segments powered by machine-learning models have become very important for us as client's display different behaviors depending on the category with varying frequency of purchase and consideration periods." - Judit Takács Miranda, Head of Digital Marketing

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Likelihood to Buy Predictive Attribute

The Likelihood to Buy attribute is one of many audience segmentation tools available with Kevel Audience. These attributes are generated by dedicated models to offer predictions regarding a user’s likelihood to buy a product from a single or set of categories. 

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Kevel helps you unlock audience insights and make segmentation meet your campaign needs

A good CDP helps you make the most of your first-party data, which can be a highly-profitable first step toward better understanding your audience -- especially if you have a large and diverse customer base like El Corte Inglés. Kevel Audience helps you do just that.

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Read more about El Corte Inglés’ journey with Kevel.