TradePoint is the trade only arm of B&Q offering trade prices to all 2 million TradePoint members on over 12,000 building supplies products. Open early until late, seven days a week, TradePoint operate in more than 300 stores UK wide with 150 dedicated trade counters.

The Challenge

In 2016 TradePoint recognised that they had an opportunity within their customer database to enhance and improve their marketing and communications in a data lead strategy. They wanted to make the database work for them effectively to enable them to build targeted campaigns to promote offers to members in a cost effect way. Customer data was historically collected at the point of sale with little control over quality and historically was formatted badly so was not useable.

In February 2016 TradePoint approached DBS Data to look at how they could use their data expertise to turn the customer database into something usable. The project was signed off in September 2016 and the data experts at DBS got to work.

What we did

The first task was to completely reformat the data into a workable customer database. This involved taking nearly 2 million customer address records and re-formatting them to PAF standard. Each record was then cleaned so that the business name and customer contact names were in separate fields. Work was done to highlight real business records versus consumer records (consumers who had signed up as trade members but who did not have a business). This work illustrated that TradePoint had as many as 30% non-trade members and only 70% were actually trade members. The cleansing process also identified goneaways, deceased and new addresses and cleansed the email addresses. The result of this work was a clean and properly formatted customer database that could be used effectively for marketing & customer communications.

Once the data was clean the DBS team of data experts appended business and consumer insight to the data from the B2C Lifebase and B2B BusinessBase data universe solutions. Providing TradePoint with deeper knowledge about their members enabling more targeted communications.

The Results

The result of all this work is that TradePoint now have a customer database that is accurate and up to date and can be used with confidence to target members with relevant messaging on a daily basis. The team at DBS Data continue to manage the data quality by taking a weekly feed of all new records and record updates to clean and verify before they are added back into the database. This work is always turned around quickly so that the marketing team & members can get the benefit.

“We have always known a lot about our members due to the membership data model that we use, however the data wasn’t stored in a usable format to be able to be incorporated into our marketing campaigns. Since we started working with DBS, we have cleansed, verified and enhanced our customer database allowing us to talk to our members about the things they care about. The benefits have been fantastic and we are in a strong position to meet GDPR legislation going forward.” Lisa Wise, Marketing Manager, TradePoint