The Challenge
As an e-commerce brand, luxury fragrance company Shay & Blue’s goal was to build a new engaged audience for their email marketing activity over the key sales period, Black Friday. But, as a strategic agency, we wanted to elevate this – building up everlasting data-driven targeting lists.
We devised objectives to boost their mailing list, while making Black Friday their best sales period ever:
- Increase new customer visits by 30% YoY
- Increase ROAS by 100% YoY
- Decrease cost per acquisition by 50% YoY
- Increase number of transactions by 150% YoY
- Increase revenue by 150% YoY
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The Strategy
The award-winning strategy was possible through the collaboration of each team member bringing their expertise together. A fully integrated campaign through the power of teamwork.
Our approach was two-pronged: lead generation and conversion. With a robust understanding of the market, and Shay & Blue’s wider business goals, our strategy was to:
- Build up quality data, preparing for high levels of competition
- Build trust with the brand, boosting awareness in a saturated market
- Amplify branding, increasing recall while bringing something fresh to market
- Test and learn to understand the consumer’s appetite
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Lead generation
Shay & Blue pioneer accessibility and individuality. Their 18-26-year-old target audience is ‘rebellious in nature, wanting more fun, more choice and more conscious.’ Award-winning work is built with the audience in mind, and that’s exactly what we did. It was important we elected the rebellious nature throughout the ad, appealing to Shay and Blue’s consumers.
The first tactic was lead generation. After careful consideration and collaboration, the team wanted to convey a playful and exciting campaign that would generate exceptional results, and we had just the idea. We pitched that Shay & Blue offer a free 10ml Blood Oranges fragrance around Halloween to build trust between brand and audience. As 68% of Shay & Blue’s sales come from repeat business, getting the product into the consumer’s hands was vital.
Broad targeting and layered interest tactics maximised budget while attracting those with an affinity with the brand’s promises. From this, we built up Shay & Blue’s data and mailing list, facilitating precise targeting through lookalike audiences.
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paid media
In the spirit of joint team effort, our Paid Media team crafted a paid media plan for maximum flexibility before Black Friday, testing and focusing budget on historically best-performing channels, using prior campaign and audience learnings into overdrive to maximise sales. We focused on small budgets on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, utilising a range of creative static image ads, lightweight motion ads, video ads, and dynamic product ads to showcase the product and offer.
We activated a second burst of lead generation in the week before Black Friday. We built upon the data already collected, gaining foresight into the thirst for the products before Black Friday.
On Black Friday, we targeted lookalike audiences using data collected through lead generation and the client’s CRM data, alongside layered interest audiences to drill down into niche beauty and fragrance audiences with an affinity for affordable and ethical, yet luxury products.
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Implementation
Shay & Blue refresh their aesthetic seasonally, and the brand evolves accordingly. We produced a creative that screamed Shay & Blue from the rooftops, with the design complimenting their autumn aesthetic, ‘Own The Night’.
Our fantastic creative team embodied Halloween and turned their Blood Oranges fragrance into Bloody Oranges; they loved it – they even decided to use it across their web campaign!
Our messaging framework played on horror movie tropes, combining engaging copywriting, emphasising deals and price-slashing. This helped us to contend with the rising cost of living and competition.
We split-tested creative and pushed the boundaries of the brand to stand out on social, where we knew competition would be fierce. Our abundance of creative distinguished us; we retargeted people with fresh ads, increasing brand awareness whilst avoiding ad fatigue.
The Black Friday adverts emphasised the urgency with our copy – “Going, going, gone!”. Copy is limited on social, so we spearheaded creative design to convey the extent of the deal alongside urgency.
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Results
With a 1009% ROAS, the campaign resulted in a record-breaking period of online trading for Shay & Blue, revenue attributed to Paid Media increased by 244.59%, generating their biggest month in online revenue in a single week – a huge impact for a small, niche brand.
We also saw high levels of engagement among younger audiences, who left comments on social media. New customer site visits increased by 49.23% and revenue from all sources increased by 159% YoY.
Vital to success, we integrated the campaign into all owned media; first touchpoint to website. Our foreplanning, strategy and execution increased awareness of the niche brand, while competing with major labels and retailers.
Shay & Blue view us as their strategic partner – the direction we plan to develop with more clients this year. The sweet scent of success!
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Results
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The way Arke has driven and managed this campaign, alongside the results, is exemplary. It has given us the confidence to let Arke lead the way on our future campaigns and determine the direction our paid media needs to go in to truly drive our brand forward.
Managing Director
Shay & Blue
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