Marketers who persist in using retargeting techniques – even though consumers hate to be chased around the Internet – need look no further than the experiences of ethical retailer BAM for proof that personalisation, rather than bombardment, is the key to increased sales.
The environmentally sustainable and ethically-minded retailer, which was founded by former pole vault athlete and explorer David Gordon, decided to change tack after previously running retargeting campaigns, which made it hard to measure ROI for its advertising efforts.
Realising the need to align its retention and acquisition strategies across online and offline, BAM turned to Conversant – which was recently acquired by Publicis as part of the Epsilon deal – to build a new personalised display programme and be able to develop its channels.
BAM’s new display programme uses Conversant’s CRM Media Solution to show a mixture of brand, offer and product ads, customised to the individual viewer and providing a much more relevant advertising experience.
The programme aims to provide a long-term view and drive demand over time throughout the whole sales funnel. As part of this, messages to consumers are now personalised according to a huge range of variables, notably whether they are return or new customers and what they as a buyer want to see, such as offers or similar items.
This overhaul has not only spurred new customer growth, with BAM winning 18,000 new customers, it has generated £700,000 of incremental revenue.
BAM has also witnessed a 30% increase in customers making a second purchase and a 9% increase in orders per person, with a 20% increase in site visits after customers have seen an ad.
BAM ecommerce manager Steve Newman said: “In the old days it was pretty straight forward; the customer saw an ad, used an offer code, and your cost of acquisition was very easy to work out. For digital display, I had been used to working with the mentality of the banner and the creative – that how it looks is not as important as getting the click.
“But we’ve evolved beyond that now – just looking at the different touchpoints of how customers are interacting shows you can’t take a single journey anymore. The trick is to find a model that gives credit where credit is due.”
“In the occasional month when we had no direct mail activity – so it didn’t have a strong impact ‒ I could only see Conversant as the influencer. That was when it clicked that what they’d been telling us was incredibly accurate – the programme was doing exactly what it was meant to be doing. It shows touchpoints across our entire attribution model – it’s helping all the other channels in our marketing mix.”
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