How to consistently and efficiently connect with unique, qualified consumers in a personalized way is a puzzle every retailer would like to solve. Pier 1 has built its premiere home furnishings on strong, personal relationships with their customers. The brand focuses on providing the decorating inspiration and guidance that helps customers create beautiful, personal spaces in their homes. This focus on enhancing customers' lives mirrors the Pinterest environment, which – more than any other social platform – exists to inspire individuals to be the best version of themselves. The close alignment between the two companies' values made partnership an obvious way to help Pier 1 expand their reach and brand exposure.
In addition to consistently cultivating 1:1 relationships with the core Pier 1 audience (a group which falls into a slightly older demographic), the brand also strives to continue expanding their appeal with younger demographics, like Millennials.
Strengthening existing relationships and forging new ones are both business goals that sometimes require trying untested tactics to get out in front of the competition. While Pier 1 was already successful on Pinterest, they wanted to take their Pin game to the next level to help them reach a broader audience, deepen their connection with their existing audience, and drive more targeted traffic to their website. Because of iProspect's collaborative partnership with Pinterest, Pier 1 was invited to be first-to-market with the social platform's new One-Tap feature, an alpha test with the potential to provide valuable testing on several fronts.
Pinterest's One-Tap feature blends the platform's aspirational and ecommerce sides by allowing consumers to jump directly from a Pin in their feed to its source site without going through the interim step of enlarging the Pin, thus reducing the steps – and metaphorically, the distance – between the brand and the customer.
Before activating the account-wide feature, Pier 1 and iProspect evaluated the opportunity against the inherent risks of changing the user experience and running an alpha test. While the team aimed to achieve a higher CTR, they were concerned that cutting out the usual middle step of enlarging the pin might cause a decrease in the engagement rate (ER). To help Pier 1 assess the situation and make a confident decision, iProspect provided data-driven analysis and forecasting based on historical performance and trend data gathered from Pier 1 and other iProspect customer campaigns across a variety of social platforms.
Once the decision had been made to proceed, iProspect's in-depth insight into audience behavior helped ensure that the campaign was effectively targeting the right customers with the right messages. Combining the initial analysis with broader insights about audience demographics and online behaviors, iProspect helped Pier 1 develop a strategy that aligned with the brand's personalized approach to customer engagement.
The team structured the campaign around three integrated targeting tactics. First, the campaign helped Pier 1 reach new audiences based on their interests and intent. The team used Pinterest's keyword targeting and interest targeting tools to reach a unique audience for whom the Pier 1 messages would be highly relevant. Second, the campaign helped Pier 1 reach an even more qualified audience by re-engaging users who had already interacted with the brand. This arm of the campaign used Pinterest's new re-engager component to retarget users who had previously engaged with relevant paid or organic content by serving them content about same, similar, and complementary products.
Ultimately, the goal of all these tactics and tests was to further personalize and deepen the Pier 1 relationship with a specific customer audience by creating a relevant, 1:1 connection and ongoing conversation that was tailored based on the customer's interests and behaviors.
- 59% increase in Engagement Rate (ER)
- 639% increase in Pier 1 Click-through Rate (CTR)
- 76% more efficient than Pinterest One-Tap benchmark Click-through Rate (CTR)
Pier 1 drove increased site traffic and user engagement across all target audiences and categories. In fact, in December 2016, Pinterest identified Pier 1's campaign as one of the strongest performing campaigns they'd seen to-date with One-Tap, and established the brand's campaign as the benchmark for success within the home decor industry. Interestingly, though a reduced Engagement Rate was one of the calculated risks associated with the alpha test, it turned out that the One-Tap feature contributed to a substantial increase in the key engagement metric.
