Cheetah Digital, a leading cross-channel customer engagement solution provider for the modern marketer, has announced it has strengthened its partnership with Castorama, part of the British DIY group Kingfisher, to rapidly scale its customer loyalty strategy

Like many brands, Castorama was concerned about the upcoming death of the cookie. They were looking to take a proactive approach to be prepared, have peace of mind, and be in a strong position to navigate the change. 

Specifically, Castorama sought a way to capture insights left by consumers across in-store and online visits, orders, and purchases. At the same time, it also desired a full, 360-degree view of its customers, allowing for more transparent and effective communication.

By leveraging Cheetah Digital’s capabilities, Castorama could redesign its customer data platform, which allowed the storage of data and therefore, enriched its various systems. This data resulted in messages being sent that were closely aligned with customer preferences and expectations. Castorama could also develop its contact list and gather consumer consent ethically. 

Through its engagement with Cheetah Digital, Castorama sends roughly 180m emails per year, and its conversion rate is 40%.

“We must prepare ourselves for a world without cookies where zero-party data will be increasingly complicated to obtain, strengthening our customer knowledge by other means. Zero-party data fits completely into this idea of giving our customers the opportunity to give us their information at the time they consider most appropriate,” says Phillippe Deschodt, data and CRM manager at Castorama.

According to Deschodt, email is and will remain an essential channel for creating proximity and being able to communicate effectively with customers. However, email alone is no longer enough and must be complemented with other customer-preferred channels like SMS and push notifications, for example. Now each new campaign is replicated across Castorama’s various channels, but with its own objectives.

“We’ve been working in collaboration with Cheetah Digital for more than seven years now. This longevity is due to the support we receive from the Cheetah teams, and their responsiveness to our problems,” Deschodt adds.

Cheetah Digital’s VP of client success EMEA, Nick Watson, says that it’s exciting to work and evolve with longtime customers like Castorama, continuously leveraging innovative loyalty solutions to help them transform customer experience at scale and remain agile in a dynamic marketing landscape. 

“The death of cookie tracking has been a great opportunity for Castorama to revamp its brand-consumer relationship, establishing personalisation at scale. We’re thrilled that we’ve been able to build on our strong partnership, helping to position them strongly both now and into the future” Watson says.