Objective
A global beauty products manufacturer with distribution in more than 100 countries sought to transform its direct-to-consumer approach for multiple branded e-commerce sites. It desired to drive performance through personalization at scale, across an ecosystem of owned and paid channels.
Strategy
The Infinite Customer Journey, Leverage Lab’s proprietary methodology serves as the hub for achieving personalization at scale. The “always on” personalization at scale engine leverages a 360-degree customer view of user data including behaviors and affinities. It hones in clear intention signals to deeply personalize in both owned and paid channels.
Data had to be unlocked from the existing silos and centralized. A Customer Data Platform (CDP) and custom-built Enterprise Customer Data Infrastructure (ECDI) were necessary to resolve identities and create singular profiles, gain behavioral, affinity and transactional insights, and create activations across multiple platforms. Rich data also provides the ability to know where consumers are in the journey and align the audience with the right message and right product, at the right time in the right channel.
The Infinite Customer Journey progressively moves audiences through each stage based on data and insights gathered. Data in the CDP is used to quantify each stage of the customer journey. The Infinite Customer Journey approach helps lower the cost to reach more of the customers you want, converts unknown audiences to known audiences, increases sales for customers with a high lifetime value and drive loyalty.
For example, in the awareness stage of a customer journey, known audiences can be suppressed with a focus on capturing new customers, which cuts wasted ad dollars targeting people already in the pipeline. For potential customers in the engagement stage, scores can be applied to anonymous and known users which helps significantly stretch the ad budget. Profiles in the consideration stage can capture interactions across all channels. If a cart is abandoned in the conversion stage, a profile can be added to a remarketing segment. High-value audiences considered loyal customers can be targeted to become re-engaged if they haven’t purchased in the past 90 days.
For this initiative, we focused on two primary goals:
1) Capitalize on segments of repeat purchases
2) Target new customers based on insights from customers with two or more purchases
First-party data from the customer data platform was used to personalize engagements depending on the level of engagement in each stage of the journey. Ads were uniquely tailored with a specific message and product to drive re-engagement for customers who lapsed more than 90 days.
First-party data was also harnessed across channels to create and scale lookalike audience segments that share similar interests with the most engaged users. Campaigns were created to target potential new customers based on lookalike audience segments of customers who purchased more than two specific product types in the past. An infinite loop of data and insights allowed for continuous improvement, which helped boost the return on advertising spend.
Impact
From nails to lashes, cosmetics to hair care – each product and message were tailored and optimized to the specific audience segment and stage of their journey. The shift to an “always on” personalized marketing approach allowed the client to reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right channel, and with the right product and message.
The return on ad spend from the Infinite Customer Journey approach increased by 297%. Beyond initial improvements, in some instances we saw more than 1,000% return on ad spend. Based on success from this initiative, our next goal is to drive next-level personalization at scale in both owned and paid channels.
