Industry observer Barbara Thau recently reported on Pier 1 using a new Infor CRM tool to ensure, among other things, that denizens of Manhattan don’t get e-mail blasts imploring them to buy outdoor furniture.

The home décor merchant has been using CRM since 1998, Thau said, “as a tool to analyze and gauge its outbound marketing efforts, including newspaper advertisements, direct mailers, e-mail marketing and online banner advertisements.”

Brian Murphy, customer database manager for Pier 1, noted that “merchandising departments use the data to understand what people are buying together — a market basket type,” adding that Infor CRM Epiphany is designed to help companies run marketing campaigns that match up with shopper preferences, integrate marketing across a variety of channels, provide customer insight to boost sales productivity and manage marketing and sales resources more efficiently, Thau reported.

“But while 80 percent of the things that we needed to do worked perfectly for us,” the product had its limitations, Murphy told Thau.

“Pier 1’s objective was to have access to data all over the organization and put it in the hands of the marketers,” said Jackie Palmer, senior product manager for Infor CRM. Pier 1 has more than 1,000 stores, and according to Thau, “has zeroed in on marketing as a key facet of its growth strategy.” That means, Murphy told her, “more targeted marketing, a better understanding of who the consumer is, and how we can take market share from competitors. How can we sway our customers to pick our merchandise over some others?”

Infor launched CRM Epiphany Outbound Marketing in March, with more than 39 feature enhancements, Thau said, “including External Data Access, which enables Pier 1 marketers to harness information from across the entire retail organization directly... Previously, when the retailer wanted to reconnect with its inactive customer database and conduct a marketing test with those shoppers, it had to partner with the IT department to bring these customers into the database, modify back-end processes and then have the data removed after the test. That’s no longer the case.”

As Murphy told Thau, “I can go into any data source now” and find information such as home values. “Does a shopper live in a ranch house or an apartment? That way we can tailor messages to them.” Direct mail and digital marketing campaigns can more easily and accurately be tailored to shopper segments.