GA Creative Brands

Database Management Solution for Direct Interactive Marketing

GA Creative Brands are the suppliers of fully South African designed clothing and footwear brands, Cutty and Jonathan D (view their site here: gacreativebrands.co.za). An important part of their marketing strategy is their direct communication with a database of consumers that they have built up over time via email and SMS.

GA Creative Brands run competitions using an SMS Shortcode to collect entries, and they had a newsletter sign up form on their website that stored addresses on Mailchimp. Their database was not being centrally managed and unsubscribe data was going missing across the two systems they used and they were unable to learn more about their community or target their communications. They also needed a Store Locator function that could be operated via SMS only. My friend Daron Chatz who is the creative director for GA Creative Brands asked me to help bring order to their current database strategy.

From the list of retailers and stockist that GA Creative Brands supplied, I created formulas to work out which stores should be returned as results for each city and town in South Africa. Then I created the bulk import file and we imported this directly into the Shortcode reply system to create the SMS Store Locator Service. If you are in South Africa, you can try this out by SMS’ing the name of your city or town to 45625.

I consolidated all of the various bits of consumer information and contacts that they had and pulled together a database of about 40,000 subscribers that had opted in to receive their regular communications. I moved them onto the Send.Marketing platform and developed a custom integration to synchronise the data coming from the SMS Shortcode (competition entries and store locator queries). I was then able to automatically match up contact details (mobile numbers and email addresses) that belonged to the same person and to started gathering more detailed demographic and interest data about these consumers.

I setup autoreplies and a two-step opt-in process to increase the amount of detailed information and email addresses being collected by their advertising and competitions. To make them most self sufficient in sending their email campaigns, I created email newsletter templates that can be used in a drag-and-drop or a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. Automatic birthday messages and thank you messages have also been setup for each brand.

As a result, the percentage of email addresses in their database is increasing and they are able to reliably capture unsubscribe requests on mobile and email communications and the database is being enriched with detailed interest and demographic information so that targeted campaigns can be sent.