How IMS used data to capture online market share for a premium footwear brand

After several years of online growth that relied heavily on online discounts, the premium footwear brand recognised the need to win consumers based on a compelling brand story and relevant customer experience. Our challenge was to acquire the right type of customers while fostering long-term loyalty to insulate the brand from fickle customers.

By leveraging data insights, we were able to:

• Streamline their ad funnel, unlocking opportunities for optimisation and cost-efficiencies;
• Meaningfully nurture the customers, providing hyper-personalised content that accelerated their path to purchase (and re-purchase)

Bolstering brand perception to command higher price points

One of our key mandates was to reverse the impact of a customer acquisition strategy characterised by short-term marketing tactics, allowing the brand to command higher market share without discounting prices. To carve a unique voice in the market, we conducted social listening to uncover key learnings in how our target consumers perceived competitors. This allowed us to adopt a compelling brand story that was relevant and resonated with our target audience, encouraging them to buy into the brand purpose. The insights team developed a communications guidebook, combining insights into the needs of our audience with data from consumer journey mapping.

Optimising ad strategy for profitable, long-term customer acquisition

A reliance on discount-driven customer acquisition had resulted in low customer retention rates and little value in customer data collected. We used our suite of tools to audit existing ad strategies and unveil potent insights that could be integrated into a long-term strategy to building, and then converting, the brand audience. Using Tableau and Microsoft Power BI for insights work and visualisation, our analyst team worked closely with the branding team to align on brand vision and build an ad funnel that could be supported by agile, Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) marketing strategies.

Our results within three months demonstrated:

• 47% increase in click-through rate
• 48% increase in landing page conversions
• An ROI of 11.2 on ad spend (versus 3.5 upon account takeover)

Leveraging consumer behavioural insights to engage and retain customers

Once our new ideal customers had been acquired, our next mandate was to ensure they build lasting loyalty to the brand. Our first step was to map out consumer journeys based on insights from our Business Intelligence team. We used this information to build a content marketing framework that allowed the brand to optimise conversion at each stage of the consumer funnel. Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we worked with the brand to ensure that every brand-user interaction was hyper-personalised to that individual customer’s needs and wants, creating meaningful brand moments that led to repeat purchases.

Within six months of implementation, customer retention increased from 9.5% to over 30% on non-sale items.

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