The Entertainer is the UK’s largest independent high street toy retailer, operating more than 170 stores. The company was founded by the husband-and-wife team Catherine and Gary Grant in 1981, when Gary purchased a local toy shop in Amersham, England. The Entertainer is part of a family of brands which also includes Early Learning Centre (ELC).

The Challenges

The Entertainer and Early Learning Centre wanted to modernise their communication methods with their customers. They required a truly scalable SaaS platform that could handle the amount of customer actions and events that occur across their digital and physical landscape. With COVID-19 and the dramatic rise of online shopping, the underpinning technology that communicates with customers needed to fit the purpose. Not only was the technology required to collect and store consumer data at a profile level, but also to be able to visualise the insights, enrich that data, and take action upon it in the correct marketing channel.

The Solution

The Entertainer and ELC have deployed the full Mapp Cloud suite, including the modules Mapp Engage, Mapp Acquire, and Mapp Intelligence. From a platform standpoint, these are just the building blocks. The strategic implementation of these modules, with a fully integrated approach into their Hybris eCommerce platform, has revolutionised their marketing capability. Teams from customer services, marketing, eCommerce, merchandising, and optimisation all leverage Mapp’s tools to improve the customer experience.

One of the fundamental parts of the project was combining all “service messages” from the website, including order confirmation, click and collect, and back-in-stock emails, alongside all marketing communications from email and SMS. The real-time world built on the scalable Mapp infrastructure has enabled the marketing team to control service messages and boost upsells and cross sells, new marketing acquisition, and personalisation at scale on every communication being deployed.

The Results

With all the data unified in Mapp Cloud, The Entertainer’s ability to use first-party data and customer insights from all digital channels has been a big step forward. Now their audience
segmentation – based on all onsite behaviour and generated insights – has supercharged the efficiency achieved in ad buying and retargeting strategies.

The Entertainer and ELC are now running more automated campaigns than ever before, while finding in-market audiences for key product brands and categories. The ability to combine purchase data, real-time web browsing behaviour, channel activity, and predictive analytics creates segments that are highly targeted, resulting in strong revenue-performing campaigns.

Since implementing Mapp Cloud, The Entertainer and ELC have achieved phenomenal results: