Data collaboration is a powerful way to unlock business value. In this fourth article in our series on the subject, LiveRamp VP of Sales UK Graham Tricker looks at examples showing its impact on effectiveness, efficiency and business growth.
As marketers, we’re always looking for three things from our work. We always want it to be more effective and more efficient, with the ultimate goal of growing the business. Data collaboration can help with all three.
Bringing together your data alongside data from the right partners will give you a more complete picture of your customers and their behaviour than you could achieve on your own. That could mean data collaboration between the brand and its agencies, or between the brand and its peers, or both.
More complete data means better and more informed decision-making throughout the marketing process. It helps you understand which combinations of channels, audiences and media will deliver the best results. It also informs more effective optimisation when a campaign is in process.
Effectiveness
A great example of this is the work we did recently with LookFantastic, Europe’s number one online premium beauty retailer. They spend a high proportion of their digital marketing budget on paid search, with the aim of capturing the attention of people looking to buy particular beauty-related products. However, they were thinking of changing their strategy to concentrate on customer acquisition. They wanted to run a trial.
LookFantastic wanted us to help them suppress search advertising to existing customers. These were people who had responded to their paid search activity and made a purchase in the last 12 months. They split the trial audience into three groups: those that had made one purchase; those that had made between two and five; and those that had made more than five.
Comparing the buying behaviour of the control group with that for people who didn’t see the ads revealed two things. The first was expected. Suppressing paid search ads to existing customers resulted in significant savings on media. The second discovery was more striking. Advertising to the three different groups delivered very different results.
Paid search advertising had little impact on the “more than five purchases” group. These are brand loyalists who would buy anyway. But advertising to the “once” and “two-to-five times” groups combined showed the company would drive a 1.74% incremental revenue lift. It also achieved an ROI of 4.4. And targeting the “two-to-five” group alone would increase that ROI to 7.2.
This also proved that using better data in more sophisticated ways can also deliver new and unexpected insights. As it was, the information was enough to provoke a strategic rethink of LookFantastic’s advertising.
Efficiency
Efficiency has two components in the context of data collaboration. One is operational. This involves reducing time-to-value by making data accessible to users outside as well as inside the business, e.g. agencies. The other is media efficiency; bringing data together to ensure messages reach the right person at the right time.
The latter has been particularly important in the work we’ve been doing with British Gas since 2021. In one example, they wanted to use their first-party data to improve cross-selling to customers for their four core products (Energy, Home Care, Boiler Installation and Hive). This improved targeting meant they could segment audiences by product, and send them relevant product ads and offers.
Further data collaboration between British Gas and its media partners allowed them to suppress advertising to customers who already had one or more of the other products. The company then reinvested any budget saved to deliver incremental business performance. This added an estimated 10% incremental value into the campaign. And by delivering the right message to the right person – and not delivering the wrong message – the campaign also delivered a 33% uplift in conversion rates.
Growth
Increasing revenue isn’t solely a matter of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your advertising. You also need to retain your best customers while growing their lifetime value, and acquire high value new customers.
Both of these were aims of Italian pasta giant Barilla for its Gocciole cookie brand. Specifically, they wanted to create a buzz around the new ‘special edition’ Gocciole Caramel cookie. This would then help increase the average basket value among existing customers. And it would improve their global market share by generating incremental sales across the entire Gocciole range.
We helped them run a test campaign, control vs exposed, across three audiences. Firstly, people who had bought Gocciole products in the past 12 months. Secondly, people who’d bought “indulgence” cookies in the last 24 months. And finally, people who’d bought biscuits in the last 24 months but not Gocciole products. A data collaboration with Carrefour (the largest grocery retailer in France) gave Gocciole access to the sales data needed to build these audiences. It also enabled a precisely targeted ad strategy. Each content element was adapted to the target audience; the targeted purchasers never saw the same text or the same creative content.
Once again we saw great results. Customer spending on Gocciole products was up 6.2% compared to the control. And overall brand revenue went up by 7.1%.
These are just a few examples of the value that data collaboration can unlock. In the next post I’ll look in more detail at ways it can deliver efficiencies for brands.