First-party data is powerful, but not always accessible – especially for brands working in categories like healthcare where customer data is incredibly sensitive and sometimes illegal to use for marketing purposes.

We worked with Specsavers to unlock data from their store booking systems so we could push a feed of eye test availability into our Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising, telling customers if their nearest store could offer them a same-day check-up when they were nearby. This focus on relevance and customer experience, combined with behavioural nudges and smart execution, saw a 68% uplift in eye test volume growth for Specsavers.

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.

Our research showed us that at any one-time, 14 million people in the UK were due an eye-test; but the barrier to conversion was not avoidance, it just wasn’t a priority. Our strategy employed behavioural science principles to answer this challenge by making conversion as easy as possible and using data to deploy timely triggers to drive action. We collaborated across Client, Agency, and Partner teams to build the capacity engine that would facilitate this.

Working with Specsavers’ IT team, we built a scraping technology that allowed us to extract availability data from Specsavers 900+ store estate. Our data scientists then built the infrastructure to collect, transfer and harmonise this data into a cloud-based platform, turning a mass of messy files into an asset we could utilise for media delivery.

Bespoke script solutions were built to attribute a score to each store based on availability, which was then used to determine the relevant media action based on pre-determined rules within our custom-built decision engine. Platform-built API connections then allowed us to deploy the relevant media action across our key activation partners.

Use of this data is two-fold with both applications scalable across channels:

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 applied this technology to the ultimate physical action driver – Out-of-home advertising. We mapped each store against nearby Digital OOH panels and created a set of rules to help us maximise each site’s value: 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.

In 2020, the onset of COVID-19 and new social distancing measures saw us apply the 2nd application of this data across our performance channels (PPC, Paid Social & Programmatic Display) to meticulously manage store volumes and keep Specsavers’ customers safe. Using attributed scores, our decisioning engine would trigger bid modifier direction to locations across channels.

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