Enhancing the shopper experience: Estée Lauder's programmatic ad campaign

This was a sponsored post by iClick Interactive under the Master Report series. 

Here how the campaign effectively promoted brand awareness of and interest in the diversified portfolio of Estée Lauder via precise multi-dimensional mobile targeting solutions to Chinese outbound travellers, driving exceptional sales growth for the brand.

Background

Estée Lauder (EL) is a high-end beauty brand comprising several labels which are famous brand names for females.

With the fierce competition in the skincare and beauty market, Estée Lauder aimed to spark profits using a digital approach to marketing approach at Chinese female-outbound travellers who are interested in skincare and beauty products. To promote the different labels of Estée Lauder, including La Mer and Clinique, EL sought to deliver a digital campaign reaching highly potential Chinese female-outbound travellers with a travel intention to certain destinations and drive these target audience groups to purchase at DFS stores or pre-order online before their trip. The in-market Chinese travellers would then receive an e-coupon download for a free giveaway redemption to drive sales at DFS stores when they were at their destinations.

Estée Lauder understands the shopping journey of Chinese travellers always begins prior to actual departure, especially as they spend a huge amount of time via online researching and making bookings for their trip, hence, it was of vital importance to reach these target audience groups in advance.

Challenge

At iClick Interactive, based on a plethora of data collected on our platform, it allowed us to understand Chinese outbound travellers in a multi-dimensional manner as they make a majority of their purchase decisions in their pre-travel phase. Hence, Estée Lauder hoped to promote its brand via desktop and mobile to outreach the Chinese outbound travellers before travel and precisely reach these audience groups to rapidly boost brand awareness and actual sales when they were at their travel destinations.

Solution

Leveraging iClick Interactive’s multi-dimensional data platform, we located the high potential Chinese outbound travellers with travel intentions to certain destinations and defined these audiences based on their online activities such as flight booking, search and browsing data about skincare and beauty products.

We then synchronised these potential Chinese outbound travellers’ online behaviours across PC and mobile to ensure an accurate grab of their preferences and, hence, serve ads only to these targeted users utilising various online platforms, including SEM, iClick’s ad exchange and China OTAs, with a programmatic buying approach to deliver the most relevant ad message in a cost-effective way.

We also leveraged the location-based system in mobile devices to specifically target in-market Chinese outbound travellers when they were at their travel destinations during the campaign period, promoting the e-coupon redemption download to further drive sales at DFS stores.

We also data-mined in our platform the users who repeatedly made online visits to DFS or Estée Lauder websites and reached them via mobile ads to further drive sales.

As for media, since Chinese outbound travellers were the key target audience, we carefully adopted a mobile-first strategy which could target these travellers in a data-driven approach via a basket of leading mobile social media apps, including WeChat, QQ and Qzone.

We also rotated a set of ad creatives with different content and objectives throughout the campaign period to maximise ad effectiveness.

Results

• Overall click through rate: 1.16%.
• Mobile coupon download rate: 7.83%.

Read also:

Enhancing the shopper experience: A perfect retail experience for Chinese travellers

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