Find out how we gave Moss Bros a very merry Christmas (while the rest of the retail market were left out in the cold).

With falling sales, profit warnings and store closures pressuring the beleaguered retail industry, brands are looking for new, reliable ways to bring in new customers, and increase sales to existing shoppers.

And one answer is lifecycle marketing display.

Moss Bros didn’t consider display a meaningful marketing channel

One such brand is Moss Bros. Moss Bros had never considered display as a meaningful marketing channel. However, Moss Bros were looking for new ways to find customers and prospect them to purchase during Q4, the most important quarter for retail, so they challenged us to help them.

Specifically, they asked us to:

• Increase the number of new customers they reached and converted.
• Ensure that the display channel was driving proper incrementality (i.e. genuinely new customers).
• Achieve an incremental 4:1 ROI.
• Ensure that their brand was represented in the right way and leverage their trade brand to drive performance.

We built a campaign around Moss Bros’ trade plan

From the outset, we aligned our creative planning to Moss Bros’ trade plan. We also changed the messaging on the banners we ran for them daily – this was particularly important in Q4 where, thanks to events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, trade initiatives change daily.

The campaign budget was initially split between new customers (65%) and prospecting to conversion (35%). We used our proprietary mix of robust incrementality (which we agreed with the client) and control methodology to measure the difference, and enhanced tracking implementation to split out new customer orders against existing customer orders.

We then tested the campaign against a 5% control group.

We found new customers and moved them to conversion

Using our lifecycle marketing display strategy, we found new customers, moved prospectors to conversion, and grew lifetime value. Our campaign was creative led, but data driven. We used first party, third party, ambient and performance overlays.

Importantly, the team at Moss Bros were highly engaged throughout the campaign, and refreshed creative with key calls to action which supported our targeting strategies and helped drive more engagement.

So what were the results?

Everyone involved in the campaign was delighted with the results we achieved. We generated £240k of incremental revenue at 5.4-6.4 ROI, and delivered a new customer rate of 43%. This was checked against their five-year customer file to ensure accuracy.

The cost per order during our campaign was £8.20, across new and existing customers. The control group confirmed the incrementality of our results.

What did we learn from this campaign?

We learned a number of valuable data insights from this campaign. The peak hours of the day for new customer targeting were 8pm-10pm. For prospecting to conversion it was 6pm-7pm. And Sunday was the best performing day across both segments.

Desktop accounted for 66% of revenue, mobile 29% and tablet 5%. The top three audiences in this campaign were:

• Fashion Grooming & Beauty
• Shopping
• Business Decision Maker

Moss Bros bucked the festive retail trend

Unsurprisingly, Moss Bros were delighted with the results. While the rest of the retail market were reeling from a festive season that saw a 3.1% drop in Boxing Day shoppers, 75% clothing discounts before the peak shopping season, and over 2,200 high street jobs at risk, Moss Bros saw healthy sales.

Indeed, in the 23 weeks leading up to 5 January, Moss Bros’ e-commerce sales were up 27.8% on the previous year, and comprised 16.2% of Group revenue (up from 12.8% on the last year). We can directly attribute 30% of this growth to our activity.

Moss Bros were particularly pleased with a new customer rate of 43% during our campaign (compared to an industry average of 25-30%).