#MobExAwards highlight: LA MER brings luxury online amidst pandemic

LA MER is known as a luxurious skincare brand targeted at high income consumers who values unique skincare formulas that aids in maintaining a radiant young-looking skin. Recognising the change in consumer patterns as well as the impact of COVID-19 pandemic, the brand tuned to the online eCommerce space to boost its sales with its well targeted campaign optimised for different key consumers while maintaining its top-notch personalised service.

Working with its agency ADA, this year the brand took home several awards at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's recent #MOBEX 2020 awards. 

Challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic that hit Asia has caused countries to go into total lockdown, causing all businesses activities and operations to come to a grinding halt. One of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic in Thailand, was the prestige beauty industry.

LA MER, one of the world’s most luxurious skincare brands, suffered a massive loss in revenue when the Thai government announced their lockdown on 25th March 2020. Almost 80% of LA MER’s business revenue was attributed to their physical retail outlets in high-end departmental stores while only 20% came from their e-commerce channel.

With the lockdown measures in place, LA MER had to pivot from a predominantly offline sales focus to their e-commerce platform. As high-end beauty and skincare customers are used to attending physical events and receiving personalised service in-store, the challenge was to find, target and direct prestigious high-end clientele to their ecommerce platform and convince them to make their purchases online. The brand had to double the amount of sales (USD 200K) on its e-commerce platform with the same amount of pre-COVID-19 budget to make up for the loss from the physical stores.

Strategy

To achieve its campaign challenge, the strategy was to reach high income consumers who could afford a luxurious jar of Crème de LA MER moisturising cream that cost US$300 per jar online. The challenge with the online platform is the lack of precision in targeting on most digital and social media platforms.

The only way to overcome the challenge was with the help of additional data sources and a well-defined target audience segmentation strategy. Four potential audiences were identified:

• Existing offline store customers who are regular high-value users and LA MER brand loyalists
• Existing online store customers
• New customers who are regular users of other luxury skincare and beauty brands
• New customers who are LA MER brand aspirers and can afford their entry price point product of US$150

Execution

To effectively reach and target these four audiences, three data sources were used:

First party data: LA MER’s existing customer data to identify information like demographic, minimum and maximum basket size, purchasing habit, online purchasing behavior and points of interests.

Second party data: Insights gathered from first party data were being used to develop targeting strategies on the various platforms such as creating lookalike audiences based on the segmentation.

Third party data: Xact, ADA’s proprietary Data Management Platform was used to build additional audience segments based on the characteristics of the first party customers.

Insights gathered from the first, second and third party data were applied to the different segments of the marketing funnel:

Upper-middle funnel: Reaching new prospect was key

To reach the right prospects, 2nd and 3rd party data were utilised to create brand awareness, consideration and drive traffic to the website. Native targeting and lookalike audiences were utilised on Facebook and Google (developed from LA MER’s first party data) to pique prospective buyers’ interest and get them to find out more about the brand.

In addition, custom audiences were built based on the insights gathered from XACT (ADA’s Data Management Platform) audience and new users who watched La Mer’s brand awareness videos were also identified. Multiple ad sets were ran to optimise the campaign for all audiences.

1. Core Platform Audience – on Facebook and Google, the team utilised native targeting and lookalike audiences (developed from LA MER’s first party data), to pique interest and get them to find out more about the brand
2. XACT (ADA’s Data Management Platform) audience - the team of Data Scientistsbuilt custom audiences by stitching together precise POIs (places-of-interest), app usage or daily behavioral patterns to unveil likely La Mer prospects
3. New users - Those who had watched La Mer’s brand awareness videos.

Lower funnel: Conversion was key

Layering on LA MER’s first party data to its second and thrid party data, prospective LA MER buyers were identified. Native targeting and lookalike audiences were then utilised on Facebook and Google to retarget prospective buyers and target lookalike audiences. The campaign was optimised with clear call to action to drive conversions. Here are some of the steps taken:

1. Core Platform Audience – on Facebook and Google, we utilised native targeting and lookalike audiences (developed from LA MER’s first party data),
2. LA MER 1st party data (CRM online & offline customers) – existing LA MER customers who buy at physical stores and their e-commerce channel
3. XACT Audience – custom audience built by stitching together precise POIs (placesof-interest), app usage or daily behavioral patterns to unveil likely La Mer prospects
4. Retargeted those who visited the website but had not completed any transactions yet
5. Retargeted those who abandoned their cart
6. Retargeted those who initiated check out but had not completed any transactions yet
7. Targeted lookalike audiences based on first party online and offline shoppers
8. Targeted lookalike audiences of those who had visited LA MER’s website
9. Targeted lookalike audiences of those who purchased LA MER in the past

Results

LA MER’s campaign performance exceeded LA MER’s monthly e-commerce target of USD200K by almost 500%, achieving a 490% growth in e-commerce monthly sales with the same pre-allocated marketing budget. LA MER achieved a growth of 275% with its Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) multiplied by 24.5 times.