Growing new customers through personalized LOAVIES festival campaign

LOAVIES’ mission is to inspire the young, fashion-minded audience to be awesome, proud, and confident. LOAVIES creates on-trend, affordable fashion with a fun-loving attitude. Summer is the best-performing season for LOAVIES. The festival collection increasingly contributes to this success. The popularity of festivals remains exceptionally high. In the Netherlands, the festival market collectively attracted 32.5 million visitors in 2022.

Despite the growth of the festival market, we are in a challenging economic climate; prices have drastically increased, consumer confidence (-39) and willingness to buy (-29) remain very negative. Additionally, the online advertising market is becoming increasingly saturated. Competition is growing, and expenditures within the digital advertising market are rising. Reaching the target audience through online advertising is becoming more expensive and challenging due to rising CPM and increasing competition.

These are enough reasons for LOAVIES to realize that a simple festival campaign this year would not ensure that their ambitious goals would be achieved. Therefore, they wanted to stand out among all other fashion providers…

Objective

LOAVIES aimed to achieve better results with the festival campaign than in 2022, through more relevant advertising and the use of personalization. The goal: attract a minimum of 50% new customers and 50% existing customers.

Advertisement Strategy

On one hand, we focused on improving the performance of the ad creatives (Click Through Rate and Cost Per Click) compared to last year, and on the other hand, we aimed to increase the generated revenue through the ads (Return On Advertising Spend: ROAS) compared to the regular festival campaign of 2023. To stand out, we decided to maximize personalization in the advertisements. This fosters a positive attitude towards the brand and positively influences purchase intent.

Set-up

Aan elk festival in Nederland werd één van de 5 festivalstijlen (festival fabulous, sizzling summer, basic beyond, sporty sleak en exciting extra) gekoppeld. Voor elke stijl maakte LOAVIES creative templates met behulp van Smartly. Daarnaast werd er in het template ruimte gemaakt voor de festivalnaam en de weersvoorspelling van de startdag van het festival. O.b.v. de weersvoorspelling werden de graden, het weericoon, de copy en CTA in de advertenties aangepast.

Landing Page

Each festival style received its own landing page with items in the specific style. For each festival, the page title – festival name and weather forecast – was adjusted. This ensured personalization remained present even after leaving the advertising platform.

Geo-targeting

The campaigns were divided into national (entire Netherlands), regional (50 km around festival location), and local (30 km around festival location) depending on the festival and its popularity. For each festival, we set a duration from 10 to 2 days before the event. We automatically generated coordinates of the festival using our own geo-script.

Target Audience

Young, fashion-minded women aged 18-35. To reach festival enthusiasts within this group, general festival interests such as concerts and music festivals were added within Meta. Based on the music genres of the festival, this was further specified per event with genres like house, hip-hop, and techno. All individuals who made a purchase in the past 30 days were excluded.

For YouTube, audiences were created based on relevant searches and people who searched for the festival name. This aimed to reach people interested in the specific festival and searching for an outfit. Additionally, an audience was created for people who had watched one of the YouTube festival videos. These were added to the Google Search festival campaign. Subsequently, retargeting campaigns were launched via Meta, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Results

Social Ads

In the personalized campaign, we observed a 39% increase in CTR (from 1.04% to 1.45%) and a 29% decrease in CPC compared to last year’s festival campaign. Additionally, we also ran a regular festival campaign that could be compared to 2022. We found that the CTR of the personalized festival campaign was 194% higher, and the CPC was 51% lower.

As the cherry on top, let’s talk about ROAS: with the personalized campaign, we achieved a total ROAS of 3760%.

SEA

Within YouTube, the number of views increased by 2152%, and the number of clicks increased by 312% compared to last year.

We also doubled the CTR and halved the CPC with the personalized ads. The personalized ads were much more relevant.

Finally, we see that the search campaign targeting festival clothing, despite achieving fewer impressions and clicks than last year, experienced a 23.43% increase in CTR and a 25% decrease in CPC. This is likely the indirect effect of the Meta and YouTube campaigns.

In conclusion, we gathered 306 first-time buyers, reaching our target of 300. Additionally, our goal was to have a ratio of at least 50% new customers and 50% existing customers. We achieved this: 55% of purchases were made by new customers.

Personalization works, even in fashion

In economically challenging times, it’s much harder for retailers like LOAVIES to stay top of mind. Reaching the right audience is becoming increasingly difficult. Personalization and relevance are more important than ever, and that’s exactly what we’ve capitalized on in this campaign.

By personalizing the customer journey and leveraging relevant weather forecasts, we captured the attention of the target audience, both new and existing customers. Additionally, the Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) was significantly higher compared to the regular festival campaign.

This campaign also contributes to the long term. LOAVIES has collected a lot of data to further personalize in the future. Using this data, we’ve created audience segments of individuals who have interacted (wishlists, add to cart, account creation, purchases) based on a certain clothing style. Content is tailored for these segments by showcasing items of that style across LOAVIES’ channels. This ensures LOAVIES remains relevant in a crowded market.