The colour-of-the-year campaign
In your living room, bedroom, kitchen or office. Chances are you often see the products made by paint multinational AkzoNobel all around you. One of AkzoNobel’s initiatives to remain a trendsetter when it comes to colour and interior design, is the colour-of-the-year campaign. An important and international campaign that runs across multiple channels, with a large budget. So how do you then optimise the campaign, in order to get the most out of the investment? AkzoNobel came to us with these questions, and wanted to find a way to gain insight in the customer journey and pain points in order to optimise the campaign pages during the campaign period. The existing dashboard and the KPIs that were used, did not offer enough possibilities.
Optimising a campaign in a data-driven way.
Gaining insight into the customer journey with journey mining.
Visualising the customer journey in a data-driven way with journey mining
Together with AkzoNobel, we defined the most important goals and KPIs. We then concluded that this challenge required a new way of thinking. We convinced AkzoNobel to enrich traditional analytics tools, such as the dashboard, and invest in journey mining. A method that is still relatively new in digital marketing, and already widely used in finance and logistics, known as process mining. With journey mining, we look at raw data, collected in a mega-table. We see exactly what a visitor does. Every interaction, every hit, the entire flow of the visitor’s customer journey. We made everything visible in a visualisation tool.
Facts instead of assumptions
The new method led to valuable and data-driven insights into the website visitors' customer journey. No assumptions, but facts. A valuable addition to traditional brainstorming sessions where a team of marketers tries to empathise with the customer. Among other things, journey mining gave us insight into the paths with the highest conversion rates and allowed us to make a proposal to send more traffic to these paths, which ultimately resulted in a higher return on investment. We also found some interesting insights. For instance, besides the colour of the year, pages on neutral shades of white and grey proved to be as popular as ever. Moreover, visitors were more interested in product details than inspiration articles. With all these insights, we had sufficient input to optimise the campaign website in a data-driven way. Think for example of placing a call-to-action button to a product page instead of an inspiration page.
“iO makes our daily lives easier by collaborating in operations as well as inspiring us to develop new capabilities, such as journey mining.”
Vanja Mlaco, head of digital performance at AkzoNobel
Optimising campaigns globally
Vanja Mlaco, head of digital performance at AkzoNobel, is also positive about the innovative approach. “We want to increase the value for our customers. We can do that based on assumptions and gut feelings, but it is better to optimise based on the data we have at our disposal. iO put us on the trail of journey mining. This method gives us qualitative insights into how our customers act. The beauty of it? It allows us to see very clearly that there is no single customer journey. Through journey mining, we can zoom in on each customer group and adjust the campaign accordingly.”
Because the colour-of-the-year campaign is an international campaign, we also made sure that the head office could zoom in on each country. This enables AkzoNobel to manage, adjust and learn from the campaign at one central location.
Foundation for future campaigns
Vanja Mlaco enjoys the cooperation with iO. “iO makes our daily life easier by collaborating in operations as well as inspiring us to innovate and develop new areas of expertise.” The process and method we introduced at AkzoNobel will be the foundation for future campaign optimisations.