Case Study
How Tapestry helped Biscuiteers plan for growth
and accelerate customer acquisition
Premium gifting business Biscuiteers has ambitious growth plans as it continues to champion the sending of biscuits through the post as an alternative to flowers.
When assessing the business needs going forward, Harriet Hastings, the founder, wanted to enhance the marketing team’s capabilities by adding strategic and analytical expertise to the group’s skills. Recognising the value that external perspectives can bring to the company, she appointed The Tapestry Agency to help grow the company in line with its five-year plan.
Planning for Growth
Planning for Growth
The Tapestry Agency’s objective was to give Biscuiteers an enhanced understanding of their marketing opportunities. Tapestry focused on supporting them in those areas where they lacked internal expertise – marketing strategy development and analytical skills – allowing the Biscuiteers marketing team to concentrate on their strengths.
Tapestry began by developing a growth model to support Biscuiteers’ long term plans. By mapping out Biscuiteers key customer segments and analysing customer behaviours over time, they identified how individuals moved between the different groups. Extrapolating the data out allowed Tapestry to forecast how the Biscuiteers business would look in five years.
Incorporating over 650 input variables and monitored monthly, Tapestry uses the growth model to develop ongoing scenarios to ensure Biscuiteers long-term marketing strategy remains robust.
By using the model to understand customer flows over time for acquisition, retention and lapsing, The Tapestry Agency could then build out campaigns and budgets to deliver the activity needed to achieve the necessary annual growth rates.
Accelerating customer acquisition
While a growing business, Biscuiteers lacked an understanding into which channels were delivering the most valuable customers. The Tapestry Agency helped Biscuiteers develop its multi-channel acquisition strategy, optimising for growth by ensuring that each month marketing budget is allocated to those channels that are performing.
Tapestry also identified a golden window of opportunity when Biscuiteers first-time customers could be encouraged to buy again and used this critical period to maximise repeat orders and support growth.
Most importantly, Tapestry allowed Biscuiteers to understand its customer acquisition costs. While Biscuiteers had been recruiting customers profitably, Tapestry helped accelerate this growth by identifying the acceptable acquisition cost the business could support. Extending the break-even point for new customer acquisition significantly increased the pace of growth to support its five-year plan.
With this focus on growth, Tapestry is allowing Biscuiteers to tap into its latent gift recipient segment. Although lacking permission to market directly to this group, Tapestry has helped enhance the marketing materials going into gift boxes to encourage recipients to become customers. It is also driving more informed paid search and social media targeting, delivering more relevant messaging through the better us on anonymised aggregated data from this segment.
Looking forward, Tapestry is developing plans and budgets for next year to enhance Biscuiteers use of new channels. To deliver the growth needed, Tapestry is evaluating Out-of-Home and TV and support international expansion, especially in the US.
A trusted advisor
Tapestry’s involvement with Biscuiteers goes beyond its consumer business. With a growing corporate offering, Tapestry has been developing a communication plan focused on the optimal time to launch its Christmas campaigns. It has also been providing support for vendor selection to ensure Biscuiteers has the right partnerships in place for growth.
While the business is benefiting, so is the marketing team. Working with The Tapestry Agency is expanding the team’s knowledge and developing the skills of the individual members, helping support job satisfaction and effectiveness.
“Working with Tapestry has sped up the process of building our business and is making our lives easier”
commented Harriet Hastings, the founder of Biscuiteers.
“Their input into developing our marketing strategy is critical for delivering the growth we need to achieve our objectives. Tapping into David’s experiences means we are realising the business benefits quicker by avoiding costly mistakes and shortening the time frames to being more effective. “
