July 23, 2015

BrandAlley

Leading online fashion outlet, BrandAlley, has established a firm foothold in the online retail sector over the past few years. Recognising that they could make more actionable use of its CRM data, they turned to real-time technology for help. The result? They achieved unprecedented ROI from its display advertising campaigns

Brief

BrandAlley, one of the third-largest private sales websites, approached Sociomantic Labs, a global demand-side platform delivering real-time bidding solutions for e-commerce advertisers, to refine its display advertising strategy and maximise budget efficiency.

For companies such as BrandAlley, whose core business is conducted online, it’s crucial to make the most of the technologies available to segment its users, retain customer engagement, and ultimately, keep them coming back for more. As a result, BrandAlley needed Sociomantic to offer a customised display advertising solution to meet its performance marketing goals.

Strategy

Sociomantic has been working alongside BrandAlley since 2011 to help maximise sales from both new and existing customers with more intelligent display advertising.

In early campaigns, Sociomantic used information such as user logins and cookies to identify 20 per cent of the website’s visitors as existing BrandAlley customers. This information allowed Sociomantic to optimise real-time bids according to the goals set by BrandAlley, bidding higher for customers who were new to the site versus the existing customers.

This was the first step for improving the display advertising strategy. However, BrandAlley also needed to increase the level of customer differentiation to better understand the various types of visitors to its website, in order to optimise the targeting methodology to its greatest level.

To make this possible, BrandAlley took advantage of its partnership with Eulerian Technologies, a real-time analysis and optimisation company specialising in e-marketing operations. Eulerian Technologies made it possible for BrandAlley to enhance its RTB strategy with supplemental data about existing customers, such as their purchase histories.

Execution

BrandAlley leveraged Eulerian Technologies’ Tag Master feature to pass CRM data to Sociomantic in real-time. BrandAlley customers were immediately identified and matched to profiles in its CRM system. Now, instead of identifying only 20 per cent of visitors as customers, Sociomantic could see that 80% of the visitors were existing customers.

This enabled BrandAlley to differentiate individual ad prices and better customise creatives by identifying more information about each website visitor. By integrating the purchase history data into the RTB campaign, Sociomantic was able to increase investments for the highest value user segments, such as new customers or customers who hadn’t purchased in the past 12 months.

BrandAlley used its historical CRM data to more accurately calculate the value of a customer according to its campaign goals, and adjust bids in real-time. Precisely targeting customers on a user-by-user basis allowed the website to significantly increase overall efficiency of RTB budgets by adjusting each bid to the value of each website visitor.

Results

Using Sociomantic’s real-time bidding and data management solutions alongside Eulerian Technologies’ web analytics and tag management solutions, BrandAlley was able to identify four times more customer visits to its website and segment them accordingly in real time.

By supplementing Sociomantic’s real-time user profiles with this CRM information, BrandAlley was able to enhance the bidding algorithms to achieve more accurate pricing for its display ads. Additionally, Sociomantic could dynamically personalise the ad creatives based on a customer’s real-time profile, supplemented by CRM data. BrandAlley saw a four-fold increase in volume of sales year-over-year as a result.

Overall, the campaign significantly increased BrandAlley’s return on investment in RTB, in comparison to the previous retargeting campaign, as well as doubling the number of new customers coming back to the site.