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From the 12th Annual Shorty Awards

January Digital and Top Beauty Brand Sell Out Product Relaunch, Increasing Revenue and ROI by 20%

Entered in Consumer Brand, Beauty, Retail & E-Commerce, Facebook

Objectives

A groundbreaking beauty brand with more than 50 complexion shades, shattered all sales records when it launched in 2017.

In 2019, this celebrity backed beauty brand charged January Digital with increasing revenue, ROI, and brand demand/awareness through an existing product relaunch.

Partnering with their agency, January Digital (JD), we created a social media advertising campaign to relaunch a cult body makeup product in two new shades. The goals were to increase revenue and ROI by 20% and sell out of the product as soon as possible.

Strategy and Execution

Strategy:

To achieve our goals, we identified the appropriate audience and used them to heighten buzz, then created a sense of urgency for customers to purchase items from the popular and highly coveted makeup brand. Here’s how we did it:

 

  1. Identify Audience.

The goal of achieving a sellout scenario meant driving sales and targeting advocates who would share our paid messaging. This required targeting the right people, at the right time, with the right messaging. We also needed more insight into social media interactions, past purchases, and consumer activity. Luckily, our brand created deep brand loyalty so we leveraged the brand CRM of over 1mm customers to identify those most likely to BOTH purchase and be a social advocate.

 

  1. Heighten Buzz.

After identifying the audience, we selected Facebook and Instagram for their ability to quickly spread news and to leverage the social interaction data we’d collected from our consumers since our 2017 launch. By forming audiences that were most likely to share, we were able to predict how quickly the audience would share the message which allowed us to stretch our budget across the largest reach possible. 

 

  1. Create Urgency. 

Once the campaign launched, we layered on audience groups starting with our highest spend for high sharers, which helped spread the news organically, even prior to advertising to those with the highest purchase propensity. Because those high value purchasers had already seen buzz about the launch, we saw higher than anticipated sales which created greater urgency. 

 

Implementation: 

Prior to our approach, there were no identifiable audience types within the brand CRM, making it challenging to determine whether or not budget was being effectively invested. We worked to pinpoint a specific target audience type, with the purpose of showcasing the body product relaunch ads to the consumers who were most likely to engage with the brand and purchase the product.

 

After analyzing the CRM data, we divided customers into three distinct groups. We then organized these groups to target them from most important to least important so the delivery would focus first on sharing and secondarily on selling. The audiences were:

 

  1. High engagers – We targeted existing followers with high organic interaction at previous launches and those who interacted with body related content. While these consumers had no purchase history, we knew they would still help spread the message.
  2. Lifetime high value and social customers – The brand's biggest cheerleaders! We knew from historical data, they were most likely to help hype up the launch, and to purchase.
  3. Previous body purchasers – These folks weren’t necessarily guaranteed to buy a new shade, so we individually created messaging for this group in order to get them excited, and then encouraged them to share the news of the new shades.

 

Throughout the campaign, the team layered in each audience group, optimized budgets to highest performers, and focused on engagement and social activity instead of revenue. Within 2 days, the most popular shade had sold out and ad interactions were 11x above the expected benchmark!

Results

A massive success, the e-commerce site sold out of one the new shades ahead of goal, leading to lower inventory in the remaining shades and increased consumer demand.

JD’s work on the relaunch campaign exceeded ALL goals:

Entrant Company / Organization Name

January Digital, Not Available to Disclose

Entry Credits