Why Kurt Geiger Scrapped its In-House Marketing Solution for Wunderkind’s Guaranteed Outcomes

After nearly a decade of reliance by marketers, traditional retargeting tactics like third-party cookies are going away. But when one door closes, another opens.

Marketers interested in better understanding customer needs and preferences in order to provide more personalized and compelling offers are turning to identity solutions as not just a replacement for third-party cookies, but an improvement beyond them.

UK fashion retailer Kurt Geiger is a prime example. As the company charted an expansion from its traditional UK focus to more of a global presence over the last five years, it took a forward-looking approach to better leveraging the traffic to its websites to learn more about its customers and what they want most.

In addition to its main house brands, Kurt Geiger London and Carvela, it also operates an outlet brand, Shoeaholics. Collectively, their online presence is important. In the UK, its direct-to-consumer (DTC) business was roughly split 50/50 between physical shops and online, but is 100 percent online in the U.S.

With 90 percent of its customers in new markets being new to the brand, Kurt Geiger wanted to convert these new visitors into email subscribers. However, the company was unable to identify the majority of its web traffic. Cookies were the only retargeting solution available to re-engage those consumers.

So the company turned to Wunderkind’s Identity Network, a proprietary identity management technology able to recognize more than 9 billion consumer devices, nearly 1 billion opted-in consumers, and observe over 2 trillion digital interactions between consumers and brands per year.

This marked a shift from reliance on third-party data (cookies) to far more valuable first-party data … something businesses are realizing is an increasingly vital asset.

First implemented on the Kurt Geiger UK website, Wunderkind could now identify a significant percentage of formerly unknown traffic. Not only did Wunderkind ID these visitors, it also contributed intelligence on the online behaviors of each, along with transactional data. By feeding all this information into its artificial intelligence engine, Wunderkind was able to create, organize, test, analyze and optimize consumer targeting and messaging.

Kurt Geiger’s first implementation of Wunderkind resulted in an immediate and meaningful impact in driving conversions and exceeded the original return on investment goals from leadership. As it explored rolling solutions out to other websites in the portfolio, Kurt Geiger decided it would try to replicate Wunderkind’s messaging cadence and email opt-in tactics with a custom in-house technology build. This endeavor involved nearly 40 software engineers to replicate Wunderkind’s solution, at a cost of tens of thousands of pounds while taking a few months to implement.

But while this solution contained many of the same tactics as Wunderkind’s — such as email triggers, messaging cadence, and creative content — it was unable to generate the same results. It was clear that Wunderkind’s AI-driven solution included data, an identity network and more than 13 years of best practices that no ESP or in-house technology could duplicate. Kurt Geiger quickly decided to abandon the in-house-built solution and doubled down on Wunderkind, implementing it across its other retail sites.

The results, again, were immediate. Weekly email acquisition rates doubled because Wunderkind’s identity network knew when, what and how to offer a visitor the opportunity to opt in for marketing offers. It was also noted that the data being collected from these consumers was a higher quality — 40 percent over their own solution — and mapped closer to the retailer's ideal customer profile. On the Shoeaholics website, for example, the Wunderkind solution quickly outpaced the in-house version increasing revenue from triggered email conversions by 151 percent.

“What surprised me is how fast they beat our ROI model,” said Gareth Rees-John, chief digital officer at Kurt Geiger. “So rapidly it was evident that Wunderkind's campaigns were delivering far in excess of the revenues that we had delivered on our own solution. Its ROI model pays for itself, but the additional efficiency and value it delivers on top of guaranteed revenue makes my marketing go much further.”

The lesson? The need to anchor marketing efforts on first-party data is critical, but optimizing its impact isn't something to take on yourself. SaaS platforms such as ESPs and CDPs may have basic out-of-the-box solutions for remarketing, but they lack the breadth of data an identity partner brings to the table — and also may be weak in the use of AI to maximize potential. They're typically good at deliverability of your messaging but lack the intelligence to make more meaningful connections with consumers. Additionally, tossing engineering resources at a custom-built solution also leaves huge data gaps when it comes to identifying consumers and understanding them as individuals. Overall, marketers need to lean on partners that can deliver outcomes rather than testing SaaS widgets or pointing critical development resources against customer builds.

Brands shouldn’t be focused on building tools, and they don't even need SaaS as much as they used to. They need partners that have the right proprietary data sets that can provide specific outcomes such as guaranteed revenue and a lift in first-party data acquisition. I don’t see marketers crying for more logins or a better tool; they simply want increased revenue and a clear ROI.

Tim Glomb is the vice president of content, data, and AI for Wunderkind.