GROWING NEW CUSTOMERS WITH DATA-DRIVEN BRILLIANCE

Baggrund

Ellos was founded in Sweden in 1947 and started as a mail-order fashion retailer. Today it is a complete lifestyle destination with a focus on Scandinavian design and quality offering, with a focus on a wide range of fashion, home furnishings, and beauty products that reflect current trends and the latest styles.

Physical stores have never been part of Ellos strategy, but customer data has been a central part of the company's business from the beginning. Over the years, Ellos has evolved significantly, leveraging the opportunities of ecommerce and establishing a strong online presence with around one million unique customers and roughly DKK 2.4 billion in net sales a year across the Nordics.

Ecommerce was thriving during COVID in 2020-2021, but the years after have presented ambitious goals and tough market conditions for ecommerce businesses. With no physical stores and a digital first approach, everything relied on how to organize and utilize data in the digital marketing investments for Ellos in 2023. The biggest challenge for Ellos has been to increase the number of ‘new customers’, defined as users who have never purchased from Ellos before or made a purchase more than 2 years ago. Gaining more of these customers was predicted by Ellos CRM team to have the most significant positive impact on the business.

The business objective for 2023 was to increase new customers by 10% and safeguard against a decline in net revenue, all with a lower marketing budget than in 2022. The brief forced the team to innovate ways of working with data and digital media in order to make a radical impact on Ellos business.

Growing new customers by 10% within one year was unprecedented in Ellos' history. Ellos brand awareness in general and brand position on lower funnel channels both declined in 2022, so the challenge of gaining new customers was even greater when branding activities should be prioritized, along with the cost-effective goal of investing less in marketing in 2023.

Løsning

The ambitious goals for 2023 required multiple initiatives within Ellos’ digital channels, which came down to three major innovations in the ecommerce strategy.

INNOVATION 1: Agile streamlining of budget data.
Historically, Ellos worked with standard campaign planning, but we identified the need of a nimble setup that dynamically could support their campaign plans, offers, and long-term branding activations across multiple digital channels.

An always-on setup was developed and implemented across channels with first-party data as focal point. The setup consisted of extremely structured campaigns orchestrated in Google Sheets with API integrations to planning- and communication tools. The setup was covering key digital channels such as Google, Meta, Pinterest etc. and supporting Ellos' two main verticals (fashion and home) as well as all parts of the funnel (see, think, do).

Ellos went from static to agile data planning within digital marketing, which required a change in the culture that quickly was embraced across the teams working together. This allowed us to be dynamic with planning on a month-to-month basis and adjust Ellos investments between verticals and sub-verticals (e.g., dresses, underwear, sports, etc., within fashion) as well as among channels and Awareness, Consideration and purchase funnels on a weekly basis.

INNOVATION 2: Growing new customers.
A main focus from the start of 2023 was to activate Ellos' customer data in digital shopping platforms, especially in the form of first-party data exclusion tactics aimed at driving growth of new customers.

In order to focus on new prospects, we spend the majority of the budget for push channels on audiences where large data pools of current customers were excluded. A wide selection of dynamic product ads with seasonal hero content for Ellos Fashion and Home verticals was pushed to capture new users' attention, whether they were in-market for swimwear, dresses, shoes, underwear, lightning, furniture or carpets.

It quickly became apparent that with the right mix of audience, algorithmic optimization, dynamic creatives, and website user journeys, we could influence the influx of new customers for Ellos by increasing investment in these prospecting campaigns when we monitored the YoY development week-to-week in Ellos’ CRM data.

INNOVATION 3: Increase efficiency in lower funnel investments.
We used various data sources and groundbreaking methods to drive product SKU-level performance leveraging unique data signals such as pricing and competitive insights.

Using Predictive Modelling we were able to categorize products by their potential sales revenue and using custom algorithmic logic in BigQuery, pulling real-time data from Google Analytics 360 and Google Ads. Consequently, this data was analyzed alongside Product ID and Price data from Google Merchant Center. This innovation delivered valuable insights that allowed Jellyfish to manage bids based on how each product yielded profitability in real-time, and hereby bring down the overall cost of sales.

After a learning phase in Q1, the remainder of 2023 became an agile investment exercise, where we could plan a few months ahead and on a weekly basis evaluate investment levels across verticals and funnels to achieve the most cost-effective growth of new customers.