Understanding the buying & loyalty patterns of collectors: recency, frequency, product and brand

Incompatible data sources and time-consuming reports getting in the way of understanding your customer? Read on to find out how The Data Refinery gave better data visibility, customer insights, and time savings to Funko.

Industry

Toys & Collectibles

Website

Funko
Funko Pop

About Funko

Founded in 1998, Funko is a US toys and collectibles manufacturer  within the entertainment industry. With an EMEA presence spreading across 31 countries, the expansion of Funko’s product line beyond Pop! figures and a customer loyalty driven by collation and curation, data management and customer insights are unsurprisingly a priority for Funko’s Head of Ecommerce (EMEA).

Challenges

Funko came to us with a whole host of data challenges underpinned by their key issue, incompatible data sources. An assorted tech stack and broad marketing channelscape resulted in various data accessibility issues and a disarray  of data structures meaning it was almost impossible for the team to get a clear idea of performance and surface valuable insight. The amount of time and effort it was taking the team to pull the data sources together to get to even basic understanding meant they couldn’t justify the effort, leading to a lot of guess work and assumption making.

The team at Funko were drawn to the Data Refinery from the start, drawn by the  speedy and non-invasive nature of the implementation – and the ready to go insight tools meaning minimal disruption to their day job - an answer to their problems just around the corner!

“The first impression of the dashboard seemed super easy. It came with a number of pre-built reports that we liked the functionality of and ticked all the boxes.”
Glenn Barnes
Head of Ecommerce, EMEA

 The Data Refinery team worked closely with key stakeholders at Funko to understand the key problem areas and how the features of The DataRefinery could alleviate those pains, with some common goals in mind...

Objectives

01

01 Single source of truth

A central location for all data to be integrated and made accessible to anyone across the organisation.
02

02 Common data model

Match all records from the different source systems into a single, easy to use, standardised data format – to increase the capability for cross system analytics and explore previously unobtainable insight.
03

03 Segmentation & Frequency

Understand how frequently a customer purchases, between brands and the old/new customer split. To be able to target audience groups specifically based upon where they are a in their customer journey.
04

04 Ability to monitor all time Product Performance

To track a specific product or brand and its performance over any time period, be it one week, a month, a year or 5 years.
05

05 Targeted Marketing

To be able to build audiences and publish them straight to Listrak to use for Campaigns – no manual efforts or uploads required.

Solution

We began working with Funko in February and the team were able to immediately benefit from our ready built suite of reporting & dashboard builder. Drawing on insights from their newly centralised and clean common data model, these reports enabled an instant improvement in efficiency.

After some hands-on use with the platform, we ran further training and feedback sessions to understand what else might be helpful for the team to be able to see.

There were some simple changes we were able to easily implement that could instantly impact the Funko team. A slightly more detailed view of paid marketing activity and “switching on” some additional data tables from Google Analytics to allow country level reporting are two examples.

More complex, enhanced changes were also accepted on to our feature roadmap that supported wider reporting requirements:

Product Performance: While many of our reports analyse the products and categories they sit in, Funko require a much more granular view of each product, the brand in which they sit as well as other attributes like how long they have been on shelf. Users can now break their sales performance down by various levels of the product hierarchy including category, brand, name and SKU in our dedicated product performance dashboard. 

Lifetime Value Reporting: To help further understand which customers are the most valuable, the team has created a new lifetime value product, helping the business to understand how many new customers were gained in a given time period, the cost it took to acquire them and on average how much they spent in their first order as well the the proceeding twelve months. The user also has the ability to filter this data by products or brands that the customer first purchased, helping the business to see which items are driving their most valuable customer acquisition compared to the cost of acquiring them.

Funko specific segmentation: While The Data Refinery offer RFM segmentation as standard for our customers, it’s by no means the only lens used for segmentation. Funko, requested that we layer the RFM model with product purchase behaviour to create a two-part segmentation. By applying both, the business can understand what products a customer may be interested in purchasing as well as where they sit in the customer lifecycle, particularly important for responding to buying behaviours & indicators in a collectibles market. All these segments have then been passed on to our audience builder to apply to selections for more granular activation campaigns (and our report builder to allow for performance tracking).

Results

The Data Refinery has now been implemented for 4 months and is used daily by teams in ecommerce, marketing and paid media. The impact has been widespread with insights being accessed across a range of data. Some examples include

  • Tracking product performance and examining best sellers, worst sellers and make actions accordingly based on the results seen.
  • Key insights on customer behaviour: Funko now knows the optimal repurchase window for their customers, allowing them to focus their marketing budget during this period, reducing wasteful spending outside of it.
  • Tracking units per order vs previous orders is important insight & detailed information, that previously would have taken hours of order data exporting, layering with product info, and breaking down across a time period, is now done with the push of a button and always available for quick analysis.
  • Access to customer segmentation tools both the standard prebuilt segmentation model but also the ability to build in our own segments as well, has certainly been helpful by brand and enables more granular personalisation of our comms.For example, offering up different discounts to specific customer groups, depending on which segment they fall into.
  • Audience building for targeted campaigns, such as VIP promos or at-risk and dormant customers, which used to take two days and involve multiple team members, can now be completed in a matter of minutes. This efficiency allows for quicker, more precise targeting and better A/B testing of segments, leading to improved retention and conversions.
  • United business decision making – results are now being presented to Product teams, Marketing teams, Wholesale and more to share trends and understand how they compare.
  • By removing weekly reporting duties and ad hoc reports, the teams are saving upwards of a day a week.
  • The marketing team can now export customer segments to their email marketing platform and run campaigns within a matter of minutes.
  • The Head of Ecommerce can now easily split performance to country level and understand the trends across the entire 31 country EMEA portfolio.
“It’s giving me information and insight that I have never had before meaning I’m better equipped to make data led business decisions to drive ROI for Funko. For example,I am now able to easily track new product performance across time, something that we've never been able to do before. Previously getting this insight was a very manual process and we could only really go back two or three weeks. Now we can see the shape of the year in a few clicks, which is great. We spent around two years trying to understand the frequency of customer purchases across brands, we can now do not only that, but drill down into average order spends, how many orders, when they are likely to come back, within minutes within The Data Refinery.”
Glenn Barnes
Head of Ecommerce, EMEA

Whilst it’s clear that the original challenge was being caused by disparate and inaccessible data sets, the real value of working with TheData Refinery is in getting easy and speedy access to the insights the whole team at Funko need to improve their outcomes. The Data Refinery is now helping to shape decision making and forecasting for Funko, one piece of data at a time.

See how The Data Refinery can help you

Whether you want to streamline your reporting, create data-driven marketing segmentations, or just want all your data in one place, we'll show you how The Data Refinery can maximise the value of your data.
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