One of Australia's largest e-commerce pureplayers in the fashion industry, The Iconic, is continuing its push for a more enhanced and refined retargeting strategy, as it grows its digital marketing strategy.
In 2015, the business revealed it would scrap the use of TV. A year on, the business appointed its first CMO, Alexander Meyer, to lead the growth and development of its new marketing strategy.
In that time, Meyer has pushed for further paid performance marketing, coupled with a rigorous testing method of media spending in other advertising mediums, including out of home (OOH) and a recent foray into radio.
Meyer says the business is focused on making its core strength the ability to balance both traditional and online paid media, while constantly developing new strategies to generate the most engagement from the two.
"The biggest challenge when I arrived was how can we connect both these points, the strengths and data-driven paid performance marketing, and the strength in the creative look and feel in a way that we can really lead a fashion conversation in Australia and New Zealand," Meyer told AdNews.
"Large corporations have budgets that they approach from the perspective of 'okay, we think we need to put 20% of the budget into agencies and creation and 50% into traditional media and 30% digital media'.
The Iconic CMO Alexander Meyer
"We can't afford to approach our marketing with that attitude and therefore have to develop budgeted strategies that allow us to maximise both digital and traditional."
Meyer says that the company will continue to lean heavily on its retargeting strategy which, while not being able to reveal exact numbers, performs "very successfully" in terms of ROI.
However, he adds that the business walks a fine line between generating repeat business and whether it is too much from a consumer experience point of view.
"In that juxtaposition between 'is it the right amount of retargeting or is too much retargeting?', our success is that we have driven very big efficiencies by spending a relatively low portion of money, for example, into display retargeting," Meyer says.
"We've actually seen almost surprisingly positive feedback on it, with a recent brand survey indicating that customers are finding it helpful rather than frustrating, which is the main challenge to get past."
Traditional media challenges
In the years since The Iconic has opted out of TV advertising, Meyer says the business has adopted "a deep culture of testing and learning" to ensure they got the best out of other traditional medias.
When it came to OOH, the business realised the medium was lacking in regards to short-term business success, with The Iconic also unable to measure its worth from a mid-term effect perspective.
"Since we realised that we were struggling to understand OOH effectiveness, we adopted the idea of digital geo-split testing," Meyer says.
"What this means is we're testing a different type of creative across various postcodes and ultimately discovering what piece of OOH advertising works where and the impact it has on the total orders in that area. From there we are able to pinpoint its real effectiveness.
"This geo-split test idea is something we have embed across almost all types of activities to find out what works for us and what we can scale."
The Iconic has also begun to invest more heavily into radio, following recent success on national networks including ARN and Nova.
From a budgeting point of view, Meyer says that larger corporations would find the investment in radio small, and start-ups would find the investment "somewhat significant", leaving it "somewhere in the middle".
"It's not like a large multi-million-dollar investment, it's an investment that is worthy of an AB testing investment," he says.
"The reason we deem it successful is not because of the success of radio itself, but how it played well together with the digital channels, with paid social, with SEO and even CRM.
The value of free channels
Despite success in other areas of the marketing mix, Meyer says that people in the e-commerce and retail marketing space should never lose sight of the most important part of the marketing mix, owned and free channels.
He says its tools like email databases and social media followings that provide the best opportunity to engage with the customer on a low-cost scale.
"The biggest part of our resources, other than paid performance where we're capturing purchase intent, really goes into making sure that our own free channels are optimised to generate consistent customer engagement," Meyer says.
"That's also the biggest focus that I have as a CMO, not so much the question of how can I get larger budgets to go on TV but it's more about how can I make sure that paid performance is as efficient as it can possibly be and how can we amplify our own channels like CRM and anything connected to video and creative content strategies to play that social angle very well."
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