RETAIL

RETAIL
New Customer Insights

+30%

Improvement in ROAS

327%

ROAS

<2

Results in less than two months

Crabtree & Evelyn quickly discovers efficiencies and new customer insights

“At the beginning, we had someone from Albert helping us, but it's so easy to learn that we started updating creative by ourselves. Everything changes constantly, so we need to be nimble. To manage the channel ourselves without asking someone to build campaigns is just magic.“
-Shenhav Kimhi, General Manager North America, Digital & E-Commerce

About

Crabtree & Evelyn is a brand with a rich history. Established as a family business in 1972 with a vision of transforming everyday rituals into extraordinarily pleasurable experiences, the business today has a retail presence in more than 65 countries including over 200 wholly owned branded retail stores. Long before the ‘natural’ and ‘wellness’ movements became popular, Crabtree & Evelyn was producing ranges featuring fruit, flower and plant essences. The brand continues to draw on its rich heritage and knowledge of plants and botanicals. Products include fragrances, bath and shower gels, soaps, home spa products, body lotions, hand creams, and home fragrance.

Challenges

Like many established omnichannel retail brands, Crabtree & Evelyn faced challenges attracting new customers while simultaneously driving revenue and demonstrating a positive return on investment. In addition to accelerating sales, the company’s data-driven marketing leadership was also looking for new creative and customer insights. The brand had been working with an external firm that had expertise in targeting and retargeting existing customers of the site. Some lookalike modeling of existing customers rounded out the offering. All of this was performing adequately. However, the tactic of continually mining the same customers the brand had always appealed to did not enable discovery and growth among new audiences.

Solutions

Crabtree & Evelyn enlisted Albert to take on their Facebook paid social program and develop a robust strategy that ramped up testing while simultaneously improving cost efficiency. Over time, the marketing team also hoped that the autonomous AI would provide more audience and creative insights. In paid social, Albert gets detailed, machine-level reporting on how interests perform and uses that to optimize audiences, ad sets and lookalikes. Albert expands cautiously, spending budget only after understanding what’s working, without limiting campaign reach by just eliminating sources. It is this careful, relentless, multivariate test and learn approach that is the foundation of Albert’s unique execution.

Results

In less than two months, Crabtree & Evelyn saw results that had been out of reach when the campaign had been executed manually. Return on ad spend immediately rose 30% while media spend remained flat. In paid social, there is a sensitive relationship between budget/performance/creative fatigue. Albert’s ability to analyze real-time data at both micro and macro levels, combined with multivariate testing, enables the system to weigh variables from all areas and find the optimal relationship between all of the above. This process enables Albert to rapidly optimize against KPIs, and in the case of Crabtree & Evelyn, achieve their goal in less than two months. Previously, the brand had used paid social primarily for retargeting, occasionally running prospecting campaigns. Now, with Albert, the machine simultaneously manages prospecting, retargeting and retention all together to deliver the marketing team’s KPI. The brand realized this enabled them to be more focused on the KPI itself instead of how they were getting to the KPI. It also meant that now they can learn from Albert about the customer journey and new personas. Armed with these latest insights, they have a truly customer-led process to develop product, creative and the branding around it.