Case Study: How an online retailer turned sales around with programmatic

Background

FashionValet, a Malaysian-based fashion and beauty online retailer, was facing increased competition, particularly around search marketing. Competitors with bigger budgets started to buy out critical keywords, forcing the online retailer to decrease its reliance on the channel. The retailer also had an issue with high fluctuations in web traffic, which often meant sluggish sales during periods between seasonal promotions and new collection launches.

Armed with a limited budget, FashionValet engaged demand-side platform Sociomantic Labs to aggresively increase its sales revenue and brand presence in Malaysia and facilitate its expansion into Brunei.

Execution

To achieve these goals, the team overhauled FashionValet’s online advertising to a full-funnel (targeting new shoppers) rather than a pure lower-funnel strategy. This approach included two kinds of upper-funnel “reach” campaigns: first, promotional campaigns during new collection launches, sales promotions, and festive seasons; second, new customer prospecting campaigns that were always switched on to sustain traffic during non-promotional and non-festive seasons. The new website traffic generated by these upper-funnel campaigns then fed into lower-funnel remarketing campaigns to convert website visitors (personalised remarketing campaign). Finally, loyalty remarketing campaigns were set up to bring back lapsed buyers.

Both upper- and lower-funnel campaigns used the DSP’s real-time bidder, which uses FashionValet’s first-party CRM data in combination with real-time user browsing behaviour to determine the price to bid for each impression.

Results

New prospects brought in by the campaign to FashionValet’s website were more engaged, browsing 14 percent more pages on average and spending an average of 10 percent more time on the website. Specialised promotional campaigns during the Hari Raya festive season achieved a sevenfold conversion rate.

Just to highlight the implementation’s effectiveness, at one point during the 15-week period, FashionValet reduced its upper-funnel spending, and the 47 percent decrease in reach-budget had significant impact on the performance of the remarketing campaigns, according to Sociomatic. Total website sales fell by 72 percent while cost-per-order shot up by 62.5 per cent.

FashionValet chose to increase its budget following this, but only by 9.7 percent.

Overall, total website sales increased by 41 percent and cost-per-order fell by 20 percent over a 15-week period.