Industry: Retail > Beauty
Focus Area: Digital Acquisition

BACKGROUND
L’occitane is a beauty retailer with a global presence in over 60 countries. They specialize in Skincare products but also sell fragrances, hair care and make-up.

GOAL
Optimize the online marketing spend to deliver more efficient ROI and bring in more new customers.

STRATEGY
The first step was to analyze the allocation of spend and overall efficiency of each of L’Occitane’s online acquisition programs: Paid search, Affiliates, Comparison Shopping engines and display. This initial high-level analysis enabled ACEI to set the course for the next steps which involved working with L’Occitane’s partner agencies to re-allocate budget and implement program specific optimizations.
Paid Search: Upon closer examination of the Ad Groups and Keywords, the ACEI team was able to determine that there was significant overspend on Brand Terms and simply not enough exposure on Non-Brand Terms. Over a period of 6-8 weeks a series of tests were implemented on Brand Terms to try to scale back spend while minimizing the impact on exposure.
Affiliates: On taking a deeper dive in to all available data points the ACEI team noticed that the Affiliate marketing program generated a significantly high amount of new customers for L’Occitane. This is not the case for all retailers so ACEI developed a publisher-based new Customer acquisition strategy.
Comparison Shopping Engines: As-is the case with most retailers, the dominant Shopping Engine for L’Occitane was Google Shopping and the agency was leveraging Google’s Smart Shopping campaigns to manage the program. These campaigns were providing low visibility in to acquisition efforts in this area and deemed to be generally ineffective based on whatever data was available via Google Analytics and Google directly.
The ACEI team worked with L’Occitane’s paid search agency to relaunch a more “traditional” shopping campaign which provided granular controls and reporting.

RESULTS
Paid Search: Reduced spend on Branded terms by 45% with an estimated 10% reduction in Branded traffic which was recovered through Branded SEO. Between 50-70% of the savings each month were efficiently re-invested in Non-Brand terms thereby growing that part of the program and bringing in more new customers.
Affiliates: By rewarding publishers that brought in a higher percentage of New Customers, ACEI was able to increase the New Customer acquisition by an estimated 20%.
Comparison Shopping Engines: By moving to a more traditional account setup L’Occitane is now able to better monitor and manage their Shopping program to prioritize their efforts on Non-Brand.

Industry: Retail > Men's Fashion
Focus Area: Digital Acquisition > Email

BACKGROUND
Zachary Prell makes high-quality men’s clothing designed to meet the needs of today’s lifestyle. Each piece offers tasteful contemporary style that will effortlessly take you from desk to dinner.

GOAL
The initial objective was to streamline Zachary Prell’s Marketing and Triggered Email programs to make them best-in-class. ACEI was also tasked with growing Zachary Prell’s marketing email list.

STRATEGY
Streamlining Communication
As a preliminary step, the ACEI team mapped out all of the existing email communication touchpoints between Zachary Prell and their customers/ prospects. These touchpoints covered everything from Welcome Programs to Email Templates.

Welcome Offer Re-enforcement: New subscribers to the brand were sent a Welcome Email with the Welcome Offer after which they were immediately added to the regular marketing stream. The ACEI team included additional touchpoints to re-enforce the Welcome Offer and encourage that 1st purchase for Prospects or repeat purchase in the case of Customers.
Expanded Reactivation Series: The existing Reactivation program consisted of a single touchpoint sent very late in the game so ACEI developed a more comprehensive program with additional touchpoints that were sent earlier in the customer journey.
Email Template: The ACEI team identified that certain core aspects of the Zachary Prell brand were missing from the existing marketing emails so they re-designed the email marketing template itself to include elements such as the “Free Shipping on all orders” and the “30-day guarantee” value propositions.

Subscriber List Growth
Keeping in mind that the subscriber growth would eventually be capped at the number of visitors to Zachary Prell’s website, the ACEI team developed a comprehensive email growth strategy which included both onsite email collection as well offsite email prospecting to accelerate list growth.

RESULTS
Streamlining Communication
Zachary Prell saw a 27% uptick in redemptions of the Welcome Offer and a 14% reduction in churn from the expanded reactivation program

Subscriber List Growth
The email list growth initiatives collectively grew the subscriber base by almost 80%. As expected, a large part of the growth came from the offsite initiatives which provided high quality prospects.