Leveraging a Brand’s Most Valuable and Often Underutilized Asset – Customer Data
Client:
Ming Wang
Ming Wang is a women’s clothing retailer that focuses on making the lives of hard-working women easier by providing high-quality, timeless, comfortable styles for women of all shapes and size.
T H E C H A L L E N G E
Ming Wang recently launched a new e-commerce website. After the intensive time and effort invested in the new website launch, driving traffic to the site was of top concern. Ming Wang had a backlog of first-party customer data, but had not organized the data or leveraged the customer lists in the past to drive measurable, repeatable engagement.
T H E D R E A M
With a newly launched website and droves of untapped customer data, Ming Wang wanted to understand which message and imagery combinations appealed to their audiences across a variety of platforms and to begin driving increased traffic to the website as a result.
T H E S T R A T E G Y
Research
We began by executing deep market research as part of our signature Growth Optimization (GO) strategic planning process. Through this research effort, we concluded that the brand needed to target the audience most likely to invest in high-end clothing of this caliber and communicate their differentiators in a way that fully resonated with this target.
Creative
Armed with this knowledge, we executed a photoshoot with women in their 40s who wore a size 10 (vs. size 4-6 that is typical of models) to align with what the data indicated was their ideal audience — professional women ages 45-65 who wore sizes 8-12.
Customer Personas
RedRover developed several detailed customer personas based on past customer data which informed the development of a variety of email and social-media campaigns designed to split test dozens of combinations of messaging and visuals to determine which would resonate most with the target market.
It was a “bullets then cannonballs,” test-and-pivot campaign in the spirit of Jim Collins. This massive split test would allow RedRover to measure the impact of each variable in an email and social campaign — from subject line, to call to action, to visual and everything in between — allowing us to fully optimize creative before a much larger scale test.
Messaging & Visual Split Tests
The messaging strategies we tested leaned on the firm’s differentiators as explained by customers (from the customer surveys). Ming Wang makes fashionable, professional clothing that is machine washable, easy to manage and made for the average-sized woman — meaning the brand started with a size 10 as the base model and then sized up or down making adjustments that flatter a woman’s body at every size. Most clothing manufacturers start with a base size of 4-6 and then size up from there resulting in clothes in larger sizes being far less flattering than their smaller counterparts, as these sizes are an afterthought. So, we tested messaging themes focused on empowerment and the raw frustration that curvy women face when shopping, including:
• #MingWangRevolution
• Fashion designed for women with curves
• Find your perfectly flattering fit
• Beautiful clothes for beautiful curves
• Flawless fashion for real women
• Rethinking flawed norms
• A brand that understands you
T H E R E S U L T S
The campaign’s strategic test successfully reactivated disengaged customers but also informed the client of new visual and messaging strategies that had the power to drive first-click conversion attribution — meaning formerly disengaged customers clicked on the emails and completed a purchase online on that first return visit.
While sales data is confidential, during the project, there were 32 emails that generated 24,043 opens and 6,114 clicks – generating a 24.93% click-to-open rate which is 62% above the retail industry average.
Google ads generated over 2 million impressions and 7,000 clicks which earned us a click-through-rate that was 328% above the retail industry average.
Facebook generated a 20% increase in audience, over 682,000 impressions and over 34,000 clicks resulting in 3.72% CTR and 13.79% engagement rate; both well over retail industry average.
Finally, the digital campaign was awarded a bronze award for “Best Online Campaign” in the 2017 Summit Creative Awards (part of the Summit International Awards) — an international competition with more than 5000 entries from 24 countries this year.
