ZALORA grows customer base by 17% with programmatic advtg
Fashion e-tailer ZALORA wanted to grow its customer base in South East Asia by acquiring new customers via programmatic display advertising across mobile, desktop and social.
Background
Operating in seven different markets in South East Asia—Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia & Brunei, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Hong Kong—ZALORA faced the challenge of growing its business across varying income levels, Internet adoption rates, languages and cultures.
To support its aggressive growth strategy in spite of these challenges, ZALORA needed to come up with a cost-effective way to acquire new customers in order to solidify its leading market position in the South East Asian region. To help, ZALORA tasked partner Sociomantic with helping the retailer to increase conversions from new customers with high average basket sizes at a reasonable acquisition cost.
Execution
ZALORA ran programmatic display campaigns for desktop, mobile and Facebook across its seven markets for a control period of three months.
A custom segmentation setup for ZALORA by Sociomantic made it possible to exclude existing customers from the campaigns in order to maximise budget efficiency and campaign focus. This was made possible with Sociomantic’s proprietary real-time bidder, which combines ZALORA’s CRM data with real-time user profiles to differentiate new-to-site users and focus investments on the ‘new user’ segment. The same engine also optimises the price of each ad impression to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) goals that were pre-defined by ZALORA.
For each of the campaigns, Sociomantic’s dynamic creative optimisation (DCO) engine ensured that each ad displayed was personalised with relevant product recommendations based on users’ on-site behaviours and offers for new customers. This was an especially important feature given the need for different languages, product offerings and promotions to be served in the seven markets.
To help ZALORA take advantage of the growing trend of mobile, dynamic banners were built with device-agnostic HTML5 in order to run with equal levels of personalisation across mobile, tablet and desktop inventory.
Results
ZALORA and Sociomantic were able to achieve a 17 per cent increase in new customer acquisition (average across all markets), in tandem with a 12 per cent increase in revenue contribution from Sociomantic campaigns.
Speaking about the campaign, Kaushal Bhalotia, Head – Online Marketing, ZALORA said, “In this diverse and competitive region, new customer acquisition is a major challenge for any retailer. In Sociomantic we have found a partner with the technology and expertise to help us reach the right prospects with personalized ads that help convert them into customers. The ability to reach users across desktop, mobile and Facebook has helped us to grow our customer base and revenues.”
Rohit Kumar, Managing Director of APAC Sociomantic said, “With its proprietary technology and expertise in the South East Asia region, Sociomantic was the right partner to grow ZALORA’s customer base across all of their seven markets. We’re proud to have ZALORA trust us with its business, and in return, we deliver incremental revenue to them.”
