Objective
With the explosion of online sales for retailers due to the pandemic, the need to modernize their prospecting campaigns became impossible to ignore. For years The Home Depot have been perfecting their data-driven marketing strategies, personalizing the customer journey for high-interest audience retargeting campaigns. The Home Depot looked to translate this success into personalized prospecting campaigns. Leading to the question – How do you personalize ads for people who’ve never made a purchase, or visited your website?
One of the main challenges with prospecting campaigns is that they’re less profitable than retargeting campaigns. The common industry return on ad spend target for prospecting campaigns is two dollars returned for every one dollar spent. While retargeting campaigns can see a return on ad spend many multiples higher than that, simply because people are more likely to buy products they’ve already expressed interest in. To improve their prospecting The Home Depot developed a data strategy that would predict what products a new prospect would be most interested in. To build new customer interest and drive online purchases, Home Depot would need to make use of a technology with enhanced creative capabilities in combination with their robust business data including: sales and promotions, product, SKU and pricing data, and website engagement data.
Execution
To execute a large scale programmatic alway-on prospecting campaign, the team began by looking at the technology that increased the ROI on their retargeting campaigns. Using the same intent tracking, they analyzed successful customer journeys and contextual influence factors including: location, time, weather, events and promotions, and sales trends.
This data was activated in 2 ways, first by creating cohorts of users similar to their customers, and secondly by automating in-ad product recommendations with predictive intelligence. Product recommendations were done in real-time with dynamic creative connected to Home Depot’s eCommerce API, so they could dynamically serve up-to-date pricing, promos, and ratings alongside every product. Every standard IAB ad was an extension of The Home Depot’s online store. A simple product carousel was used to highlight multiple products that auto rotated (or could be controlled by the user) – increasing the odds that a relevant product would catch the consumer’s eye. While Machine learning kept improving the recommendations and the return on ad spend as the campaign went on.
Innovation
This was the first time The Home Depot had used predictive intelligence to power a prospecting campaign and the technology that powered it was mostly created specifically for it. Home Depot’s technology partner’s Customer Data Platform created a shopper intelligence engine that analyzed successful customer journeys and contextual influence factors. The dynamic, data-powered templates were built with a custom API integration and interactive shoppable features that allow users to shop in ad, transforming their display ads into a storefront personalized for every user.
Results
The results proved the power of the Home Depot’s customer journey-driven tech stack. The campaign outperformed the industry average return on ad spend of two dollars in revenue for every dollar spent by forty-five times the benchmark.
Overall, the campaign delivered a year-over-year increase in return on ad spend of 867% over the internal benchmark, with the desktop portion of the campaign seeing a 560% year-over-year increase in return on ad spend.
Home Depot saw its biggest increase with audiences on mobile. Fueling the campaign’s dynamic prospecting with sales data helped the brand generate a 1,461% year-over-year increase in return on ad spend. Proving that with the right technology and 1st party commerce data you can unlock superior performance from your prospecting campaigns
Creative
