#AsiaeCommerceAwards highlight: How Estee Lauder Group cut through the beauty brand clutter in Thailand

Winning the gold for Best eCommerce Consultant award at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE’s Asia eCommerce Awards 2020 is ADA Thailand, with its campaign “Winning Over Prestige Beauty During a Pandemic”. Driven by data insights, ADA Thailand effectively blended creativity and numbers to help Estee Lauder Group Thailand (ELCA Thailand) achieve its desired results in localised setting amidst the COVID-19 pandemic with its agile digital marketing solutions. 

Challenge

ADA Thailand is the key agency managing the digital and e-Commerce needs of seven prestigious brands under the ELCA Thailand flagship - Estee Lauder, La Mer, Clinique, Bobbi Brown, M.A.C., Jo Malone and Origins, since September 2019. Not only did ADA Thailand deliver performance marketing via media planning and buying, the agency also carefully crafted end-to-end ecommerce strategy powered by data to drive existing and new customers of the brands to their websites by optimising current customer data.

The key challenge was standing out in a hugely cluttered and competitive eCommerce landscape with various marketplaces and online stores from key department stores and brands vying for the same target audience. Each of these beauty brands had almost similar brand positionings. Therefore, it’s about the value; the product benefit and brand experience that consumers will get from using their cosmetic and skincare line.

Strategy

To overcome the challenges and achieve ELCA’s goal, ADA Thailand put in place a processes to serve the business better:

Audience strategy and implementation
Utilising Xact, ADA proprietary mobile-powered DMP (Data Management Platform), ADA was able to extract audience data which can determine potential new customers for prestige skincare and cosmetic brands. 
The data was then extrapolated with the brand’s CRM online and offline data powered by ADA’s CIE (Consumer Insight Explorer, to explore and extract behavioral patterns from mobile phones including offline locations), to better understand the beauty category landscape as well as consumer insights.

ADA then took stock of the beauty category’s digital competitive landscape by using various online tools to determine where each ELCA brands stand.

e-Commerce strategy
Utilising the customer’s purchasing funnel, ADA was able to determine how and where each of the 7 brands under ELCA’s repertoire can disrupt the consumer journey to drive brand consideration and conversion

Awareness funnel – a combination of the brand’s data, pixels data, platform data and Xact data was used to precisely target the segmented audiences using multiple online platforms and a combination of static and video content.

Research funnel – Google ads and keywords were used to disrupt consumers’ purchase as they would be looking for information regarding the brands they are interested to purchase on search engines as well as key influencers, beauty bloggers and women websites where they are looking at reviews of products.

Purchase funnel – ADA incorporated tracking elements and product feed to help drive conversion

Advocacy funnel – ADA encouraged consumers of the brands to rank their products and provide their reviews so that their friends, followers and other potential buyers are able to view.

Effective creative content powered by data

Data was the backbone of our creative content development. From data, we were able to provide relevant and key insights to the brand owners so that adaptation and localization of creative work was done more effectively. Apart from that, we were able to adjust and optimise content based on performance to drive brand awareness, consideration and conversion.

Winning team structure: ADA put together their top talents equipped with the right skillset to best lead, manage and implement ELCA’s e-Commerce strategies across all seven brands under the ELCA flagship store

Execution

To ensure that the strategies for all seven brands were optimised as efficiently and effectively as possible, ADA put in place several executional best practices to optimise their media buying strategies.

An automated analytical report was utilised to monitor and track daily and monthly performance so that ADA can tweak and optimise the campaigns on a day-to-day basis.

Apart from this report, ADA implemented the agility to optimise process every two months which is an extensive performance review that covers every single aspect of the e-Commerce plan to help further improve and optimise performance. This process also allowed ADA to update the current consumer insight and competitor landscape as well as a brand audit on all seven websites.

By doing frequent performance reviews, ADA was able to constantly tweak and optimise their eCommerce strategies more precisely to ensure that they achieve ELCA’s goal at the end of their fiscal year in June 2020.

This agility process is exceptionally critical in sudden and unexpected situations like the recent COVID-19 pandemic. From the insights derived from Xact and various other tools, ADA was able to re-strategise and execute a new plan for ELCA within weeks of the nationwide movement restriction order. It allowed ADA to pivot their entire creative content strategy to target the new behavioral norms of shoppers, helping them to create new and relevant content that fit their needs during the movement restriction period.

ADA also collaborate with platforms like Google and Facebook to explore suitable solutions for the brands to ensure we are constantly ahead of the competition and delivering better performance results.

Case study 1 – La Mer:

The first ever brand in Thailand to use Facebook ‘branded content marketplace ad’ and for LA MER in April 2020 campaign during the pandemic.

https://www.facebook.com/123217088363752/posts/547683565917100

This branded content ad generated 25% of revenue during the promotion period and by the end of the month, achieving ROAS up to 24x for La Mer.

Case study 2 – M.A.C:

Google SEM dynamic countdown ad to drive urgency for a M.A.C. promotion. The execution achieved an outstanding 119.34% clickthrough rate. The ROAS was over 10x during the campaign period.

Result

With an end-to-end e-Commerce strategy powered by data, up-to-date performance reviews, relevant creative content and a talented winning team, ADA was able to achieve outstanding results for ELCA by FY20 such as achieving and average of 10 times ROAS for all of ELCA’s 7 brand.com (e-Commerce) websites.

Including achieving the highest result of  24 times ROAS for LA MER as well as 11 times ROAS for M.A.C., Clinique, Bobbi Brown, Origins and Jo Malone and 7 times ROAS for Estee Lauder during the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020.