Lids

The Client

A leading headwear retailer, Lids is known for its on-trend, unique and exclusive styles. With nearly 1,200 stores in the United States and Canada — the majority of which operate in shopping malls — the retailer offers a huge selection of top quality brands, all in one convenient place, as well as in-store customization services.  

The Situation

Started in-store, Lids’s wildly successful “Access Pass” loyalty program has two levels, free and premium, both of which provide members with access to discounts and incentives. But duplicate memberships were rampant, and very little was actually known about the loyalty program members. 

The Challenge

Lids had a large database of loyal customers, but few insights into the habits and behaviors of those customers. How often were they shopping? Were they buying in-store, online or both? Were they showing affinity for a particular team? Answering questions like these — and creating meaningful segments for target marketing purposes — was difficult if not impossible. Lids needed a solution that even non-technical teams could use to find answers to these questions. 

The Solution

After working through an extensive RFP process and narrowing down its choices to three potential partners, Lids ultimately chose Acquia CDP for its deep retail insights and intuitive interface. Immediately, Acquia CDP’s Identity Resolution Engine cleansed, deduped and standardized Lids’s data from more than 53 million raw guest records into 25 million marketable master guest records. 

Using Acquia CDP, Lids was able to define audiences with advanced segmenting and targeting, including customer buying preferences, their product purchase history, loyalty member level and more. Lids was able to analyze a virtually limitless number and combination of data points, including:

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• Trends in buying behavior
• Trends by store location
• Physical, digital, omnichannel shoppers
• Team audiences
• Trending styles
• Fashion audiences vs. fans 
• Gender 
• Coupon users
   

The Lids marketing team then used all segments in targeting via email and paid digital, leveraging the customer database for lookalike prospecting on social. 

The Results 

Lids’s three-year journey with the Acquia Customer Data Platform has been a success story. At a time when mall traffic has been down, Lids has seen positive year-over-year traffic using Acquia CDP-powered strategies. And the insights that Acquia CDP has provided have led to direct revenue increases; for example, in one holiday-focused win-back campaign, Lids’s marketers identified the top 1 million customers and offered them a time-sensitive, in-store loyalty reward which ended up driving $250,000 in revenue.