TM Lewin finds lifetime spend of social customers outstrips paid-search customers
TM Lewin has revealed that the average lifetime spend of its social media customers outstrips that of customers driven to its site via paid search.
The shirt retailer has found that its social media customers are 2.3 times more likely to purchase online than people who come to its site via paid search ads, who are 1.53 times likely to spend.
Over the last year it has been gathering and uniting data from all its digital channels including social, display and paid search with the result that it can now separate the buying behaviours and preferences of people according to each channel.
TM Lewin’s digital marketing manager Guillaume Brocart told The Drum it can now determine the differences between the behaviours and attitudes of customers that come to its pages via different digital channels, which in turn has significantly altered its attribution modelling and budgeting.
It worked with Silverpop Engage to centralise all its customers and contact data, letting its marketing teams segment the data according to channel and see which ones drive conversions.
“Over the last year we have linked all our data channels together into one data capture page, hosted on Silverpop so we had social media, email, display and paid search all linking into the same page – the first time we had done that. We can tag customers to identify the differences in behaviour between those that may come via paid search and those that come through social and those two types behave very differently.
“Before we used to target both in the same way and then wondered why it didn’t work. Social customers are more engaged with us and we talk to them a lot about what is happening around the product, and have a higher propensity to buy than our search ones. In our path to conversion – any time social is involved in the conversion the lifetime value is higher and our attribution modelling has changed as a result,” he said.
Although many business decisions are still made on last-click attribution at TM Lewin, there is more focus on multi-click drivers, which has helped improve the transparency around the value of display, according to Brocart.
“When we were measuring on last click for display we were spending about £9,000 a month and only seeing a return of £200-£300. But we then started using a different model which splits into three parts : influencer, contributor and converter, and that showed display had a major role to play in the contributor part, which meant we could up our spend on that channel,” he said.
A major focus for the year is driving TM Lewin’s exposure and further uniting eCRM and social data to render its marketing more individually relevant for customers. Plans include building a loyalty programme and developing a single customer view across its entire portfolio.
It will kick off a major competition at the start of next month to coincide with Father's Day. The retailer, which already dresses the England cricket team, is giving away two tickets for the England vs New Zealand Cricket game, and is running campaign activity around it including a partnership with ESPN, which will drive traffic to the competition page. Brocart said the competition is its "biggest ever" and will be quadrupling its campaign investment from last year.