Funko unlock customer insights across recency, frequency, product and brand with Dot Collective

About Funko

Founded in 1998, Funko is a US toys and collectibles manufacturer within the entertainment industry. With an EMEA presence spreading across 31 countries, the expansion of Funko’s product line beyond Pop! figures and a customer loyalty driven by collation and curation, data management and customer insights are unsurprisingly a priority for Funko’s Head of Ecommerce. To support this ambition, Funko partnered with Dot Collective to streamline data access and improve decision-making.

Challenges

Funko came to us with a whole host of data challenges underpinned by their key issue, incompatible data sources. An assorted tech stack and broad marketing channels resulted in various data accessibility issues and a disarray of data structures meaning it was almost impossible for the team to get a clear idea of performance and surface valuable insight. The amount of time and effort it was taking the team to pull the data sources together to get to even basic understanding meant they couldn’t justify the effort, leading to a lot of guess work, assumption making and lost revenue.

The team at Funko were drawn to one of Dot Collective’s build accelerators, Data Refinery, by the speedy way it could get them up and running with minimal disruption to their day job.

“The first impression of the dashboard seemed super easy. It came with a number of pre-built reports that we liked the functionality of and ticked all the boxes.”

Glenn Barnes
Head of Ecommerce, EMEA

Dot Collective worked closely with key stakeholders at Funko to understand the key problem areas and how they could deploy the features of Data Refinery to alleviate those pains, with some common goals in mind.

Objectives

1. Single source of truth: A central location for all data to be integrated and made accessible to anyone across the organisation.
2. Common data model: Match all records from the different source systems into a single, easy to use, standardised data format – to increase the capability for cross system analytics and explore previously unobtainable insight.
3. Segmentation & Frequency: Understand how frequently a customer purchases, between brands and the old/new customer split. To be able to target audience groups specifically based upon where they are in their customer journey.
4. Ability to monitor all time Product Performance: To track a specific product or brand and its performance over any period, be it one week, a month, a yearor 5 years.
5. Targeted Marketing: To be able to build audiences and publish them straight to Listrak to use for Campaigns – no manual efforts or uploads required.

Solution

We began working with Funko in February and the team were able to immediately benefit from pre built suite of reporting & dashboards. Drawing on insights from their newly centralised and clean common data model, these reports enabled an instant improvement in efficiency.

After some hands-on use with the platform, we ran further training and feedback sessions to understand what else might be helpful for the team to be able to see.

There were some simple changes we were able to easily implement that could instantly impact the Funko team. A slightly more detailed view of paid marketing activity and “switching on” some additional data tables from Google Analytics to allow country level reporting are two examples.

More complex, enhanced changes were also developed once they were live that supported wider reporting requirements:

Product Performance: While many of our reports analyse the products and categories they sit in, Funko require a much more granular view of each product, the brand in which they sit as well as other attributes like how long they have been on shelf. Users can now break their sales performance down by various levels of the product hierarchy including category, brand, name and SKU in our dedicated product performance dashboard.

Lifetime Value Reporting: To help further understand which customers are the most valuable, the team has created a new lifetime value product, helping the business to understand how many new customers were gained in a given time period, the cost it took to acquire them and on average how much they spent in their first order as well as the proceeding twelve months. The user also has the ability to filter this data by products or brands that the customer first purchased, helping the business to see which items are driving their most valuable customer acquisition compared to the cost of acquiring them.

Funko specific segmentation: Funko were able to use some RFM segmentation out of the box. Funko, requested that we layer the RFM model with product purchase behaviour to create a two-part segmentation. By applying both, the business can understand what products a customer may be interested in purchasing as well as where they sit in the customer lifecycle, this was particularly important for responding to buying behaviours & indicators in a collectibles market.

Results

The Funko data platform has now been implemented for 4 months and is used daily by teams in eCommerce, marketing and paid media. The impact has been widespread with insights being accessed across a range of data. Some examples include

• Tracking product performance and examining best sellers, worst sellers and make actions accordingly based on the results seen.
• Key insights on customer behaviour: Funko now knows the optimal repurchase window for their customers, allowing them to focus their marketing budget during this period, reducing wasteful spending outside of it.
• Tracking units per order vs previous orders is important insight & detailed information, that previously would have taken hours of order data exporting, layering with product info and breaking down across time periods, is now done with the push of a button and always available for quick analysis.
• Access to customer segmentation tools both the standard prebuilt segmentation model but also the ability to build in our own segments as well, has certainly been helpful by brand and enables more granular personalisation of our comms. For example, offering up different discounts to specific customer groups, depending on which segment they fall into.
• Audience building for targeted campaigns, such as VIP promos or at-risk and dormant customers, which used to take two days and involve multiple team members, can now be completed in a matter of minutes. This efficiency allows for quicker, more precise targeting and better A/B testing of segments, leading to improved retention and conversions.
• United business decision making – results are now being presented to Product teams, Marketing teams, Wholesale and more to share trends and understand how they compare.
• By removing weekly reporting duties and ad hoc reports, the teams are saving upwards of a day a week.
• The marketing team can now export customer segments to their email marketing platform and run campaigns within a matter of minutes.
• The Head of eCommerce can now easily split performance to country level and understand the trends across the entire 31 country EMEA portfolio.

“It’s giving me information and insight that I have never had before meaning I’m better equipped to make data led business decisions to drive ROI for Funko. For example, I am now able to easily track new product performance across time, something that we've never been able to do before. Previously getting this insight was a very manual process and we could only really go back two or three weeks. Now we can see the shape of the year in a few clicks, which is great. We spent around two years trying to understand the frequency of customer purchases across brands, we can now do not only that, but drill down into average order spends, how many orders, when they are likely to come back, within minutes within Data Refinery.”

Glenn Barnes
Head of Ecommerce, EMEA

Whilst it’s clear that the original challenge was being caused by disparate and inaccessible data sets, the real value of working with Dot Collective is the speed and simplicity of accessing the right data, at the right time. With a Dot Collective built data platform in place, Funko’s teams are equipped to make faster, smarter decisions across eCommerce, marketing, and beyond.

See how Dot Collective can create the springboard for momentous organisational leaps with your data. Get in touch.