January Digital was challenged to completely revamp David's Bridal's digital marketing strategy from being heavily focused on women already engaged to be married towards a customer acquisition strategy that targeted women just before they became engaged. To do this, the audience approach was adjusted from focusing on brides in-market to utilizing customer data to model the new customer target.
David's Bridal, like many traditional ecommerce retailers, has a very important brick-and-mortar presence. Driving customers to book appointments online and then prompting them to ultimately purchase in stores is the key to the business in a modern bridal market.
To find customers before they are engaged to be married, David's Bridal needed more data on their customer and more insight into the customer journey. David's Bridal and January Digital worked together to combine online and offline data on the DBI customer to help create an image of who their customer was in a broader scope. This process involved collecting data from many disparate sources and creating a model that was used to improve customer insights, targeting and messaging.
In order to measure success of this, our campaigns were focused on increasing store bookings and ultimately driving revenue through digital media.
Prior to JD's approach, DBI's digital landscape was not connected to its in-store landscape. JD worked alongside DBI to restructure the customer data systems into a single-view platform with the clear purpose of driving customers to stores through online appointments. Once this process was complete, JD was able to tap into (in real-time) customer data that was comprehensive of the online and offline experience. Having this information gave JD the ability to slice data in 20 different ways to target users specifically based on their shopping preferences.
After incorporating the new data sources, JD executed social media campaigns in Facebook and Instagram to drive appointments using the real-time data of in-store and online customers. This approach included employing lookalike segments of recent in-store customers based on price point, something previously unavailable. The approach also allowed JD to reduce waste and project possible new audiences of almost-engaged women.
In partnership with David's Bridal's IT team, we worked to create a DMP (data management platform) that brought together customer data sources—in-store visitors, appointment makers by phone, online browsers, searchers, and other online customers—to understand the entire customer journey.
This collection enabled JD to gather data on customers who start engaging with the brand online before they even become engaged or step into a store. Tying those customers back to finally purchasing in-store JD was able to customize the advertising messaging from beginning to end rather than targeting users halfway through their decision-making process. By incorporating this data into the DMP this gave JD access to real-time customer journey data to turn around and use in social marketing and beyond.
Once JD identified customers ahead of their engagement, the agency needed to find new ways to reach them. JD drove in-store appointments through creative targeting of paid social ads.
The "almost engaged" customer is difficult to find through traditional targeting options, so JD created real-time segments of the most recent purchasers in store to try and replicate this and created two lookalike groups based on value (high and low value) to help better message personally based on preference.
This segmentation of data allowed JD to personalize messages based on price point, and to update lookalike audiences to find women that excluded those already engaged or those who had already been in store but were strong candidates for getting engaged.
JD and David's Bridal worked together to modernize this traditionally offline-focused brand's approach with an innovative, data-led, digital-first campaign, using vast amounts of data to create a strategy that resulted in a highly successful social campaign.
Once a customer is in a store, there is a 93% chance that customer will make a purchase, and by greatly increasing in-store bookings via digital performance media, JD drove DBI business to new heights.
Specifically, since implementing the new strategy in Q2 of 2018 we saw:
