As the UK’s leading optician, in-store eye tests are a fundamental part of Specsavers’ business. One of the brand’s biggest challenges is managing demand at just the right level – too many people at once and it leads to queues; too little demand and spare capacity goes to waste, along with the time of highly skilled optometrists. Filling more of this spare capacity means more eye tests and more sales, while shorter queues mean happier customers. We took the data that sat in Specsavers stores’ appointment books and used it to feed our advertising. With a focus on short-term excess capacity, we wanted to drive extra footfall into stores that could handle it. For this, we needed to be able to drive action amongst an audience that was in the right place at the right time.

With test and control regions in place, we quickly saw an uplift in eye test volume growth; our test regions saw 68% stronger eye test volume growth than elsewhere.

Strongest performance was seen where the DOOH panel was directly outside a Specsavers store.

Deployed nationally, this represents an annual uplift of 1,000 eye tests per store.

An estimated incremental £28 million in sales each year.

Over 250,000 new-to-brand customers delivered by this innovation.

Specsavers stores are 50% owned by the store partner, they love to be able to see immediate impact on their business, this execution also proved hugely popular among those in-store – as did the incremental sales.

And finally – but importantly – this innovation and the ability to improve our stimulation of demand sets up Specsavers to be better equipped in a post-COVID world when optimal management of capacity, resource and costs has never been more important.

We took the data from Specsavers’ 900+ stores and ingested it into a cloud-based platform using bespoke technology. Our engineers converted it from messy data files into a harmonised asset we could use for targeting. We combined real-time data from this feed with an additional layer of business performance data that allowed us to target our media buying to areas where stores were most in need of support. We mapped each store against nearby Digital OOH panels and created a set of rules to help us maximise each site’s value by using our newly available data: If 10 or more appointments available in the next 6 hours, then show ’10 available appointments’; If under 10 appointments available within the next 6 hours, then show the exact number of available appointments, e.g. ‘3 available appointments’; Fewer than 2 appointments available – check data for tomorrow’s appointments and display accordingly.

The benefit of deploying the data in this way is twofold:

1. To deploy personalised creative, based on availability, to the right audience at the right time

2. To inform bid strategies based on availability, allowing us to prioritise (or deactivate) investment to areas where there was availability over a certain threshold

We mapped each store against nearby Digital OOH panels and created a set of rules for creative decisioning to maximise each site’s media value using this data.

During a challenging time for Specsavers, this innovation delivered business-critical results.

– An immediate 29% reduction in cost per booking compared to BAU across performance channels

– An uplift of 68% growth in eye tests in the DOOH test regions

– Modelling forecasts show that this approach could drive up to 1,000 incremental eye tests per store and when rolled out nationally, a projected 250,000 new-to-brand customers per year

– This is an incremental £28 million in sales each year at an investment level of £6.9 million per annum, resulting in a projected ROI of 4:1