NAPLES, FL: Best Buy, the electronics retailer, is effectively leveraging first-party data to enhance its targeting and drive a greater consumer response to its marketing.

Greg Revelle, the firm's Chief Marketing Officer, discussed this topic at the Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) 2016 Masters of Measurement Conference.

He reported that Best Buy's in-house database – incorporating tens of millions of consumers – is a key source of strength, and differentiation, for its marketing.

"We don't have to buy other people's data ... We can use our own data to buy the vast majority of our media," Revelle said. (For more details, read Warc's exclusive report: Best Buy's transition from "dumb" to "smart" advertising.)

Drawing on these numbers can, in turn, assist Best Buy in delivering messages with deeper relevance depending on the recipient's precise profile.

"This is not a targeting manner that uses a database to say, 'We think you might be interested in this even if you haven't been to Best Buy in quite a while,'" said Revelle.

More specifically, the shift from "dumb" to "smart" communications has boosted various core metrics across Best Buy's marketing output.

"Our email open rate is up about 2x in the last three years. That's allowed us to be much more effective from that perspective," Revelle said, by way of example.

"We're targeting much more effectively. Our web traffic is up 87% in the last couple of years, and just last quarter, in e-commerce, our business was up 22%."

And such results are "changing the interaction of marketing within Best Buy", as senior leaders witness the growing value that investments in this area can yield.

"It's moving us from being a cost center to a profit center. I no longer talk with my colleagues about how much I want to spend. I talk about how much more money I want to make for the business … And we have data now that helps us do that," Revelle said.

Data sourced from Warc