The lowdown on Laithwaites
- One of the world’s most popular wine retailers
- Enjoys a peak in sales during the festive period
- Active affiliate program on Rakuten Advertising
Campaign overview
- Used a native, fully branded coupon page to serve personalized offers
- Matched page appearance to color of grape in cart
- Traded discounts for higher spend
- Rapidly implemented via the Rakuten master tag
Challenge
Laithwaites is one of the world’s most popular wine retailers. The group came to RevLifter ahead of its busy Christmas period – a peak time for wine sales – with a view to driving up average order values (AOV) while minimizing margin erosion.
Laithwaites’ challenge was ideal for RevLifter, which helps brands to serve personalized deals and offers based on a series of goal-oriented rules. In Laithwaites’ case, the plan was to issue incentives in order to drive higher cart values.
After noticing a high volume of discount-related searches (e.g. ‘Laithwaites discount code’), RevLifter pitched the idea of build a personalized coupon page that would recapture thousands of deal-seekers over the festive period.
The brand signed-off on a trial of the technology and agreed to measure both conversion rates (CVR) and AOV against averages for incentive publishers and its affiliate program on the whole.
As a separate goal, Laithwaites also wanted to identify the customers who had purchased via offers delivered at Christmas, and ensure they could be targeted with a deal to encourage a second full-price order.
Goals
- Demonstrate higher AOV and CVR against coupon publishers
- Demonstrate higher AOV and CVR against program averages
- Stabilize margin while incentivizing a purchase
- Collect data for retargeting purposes to ensure long-term impact
Implementation and design
Every Offers Page is made bespoke to the retailer in question. It has to be native and fully branded, factoring in everything from the brand guidelines to their existing on-site widgets.
Every element of the Offers Page is fine-tuned to ensure it is a seamless, value-adding element to the customer experience. In Laithwaites’ case, there were a few extra details that made the set-up even more special.
The planning
Team RevLifter was given a deadline of just two weeks to get up to speed on what is a highly unique area of the retail space.
Further pressure centered around the campaign’s launch ahead of Black Friday, and the need to convert users while they were mindful of purchasing wine and finding codes to reduce their transaction value.
Rapid implementation
Laithwaites’ page was made incredibly easy to launch thanks to the Rakuten master tag. The pre-installation of technologies like RevLifter onto affiliate network tags has made it possible for brands to go live with a handpicked group of innovations within days.
In this instance, the tag-based implementation helped Laithwaites explore advanced forms of segmentation through the coupon page.
Design and optimization
The deal page was made totally bespoke to Laithwaites’ and featured its unique branding. As well as serving personalized deals, tailored to the customer’s order, RevLifter managed to experiment on the creative side of things by altering its pages according to the colour of wine and grape in the cart.
Later on, the team created a special “uncork your reward” button, which appeared for customers purchasing full-price items on their second order, as per the retailer’s goals.
The execution phase
Most of the offers encouraged the users to add more to their shopping cart for a better saving. A weaker offer was shown to generally improve the chance of conversion, while a stronger offer was used to increase the cart value and spark interest around additional products.
RevLifter and Laithwaites worked on a strategy that outlined the types of orders to convert immediately, and those that needed extra spend to justify a discount.
Offer building
Deals were changed based on the type of wine being purchased and the value of each cart. For instance, if a customer had an order worth $40, they would be given a small money-off reward to hit $50.
It presented a way of upselling people who may not have increased their cart value and a key method of generating incremental spend.
Traffic driving
As Laithwaites’ page was optimized for PPC, when a customer abandoned their cart in search of a deal on Google (i.e. by searching ‘’Laithwaites voucher”) they were reeled back in via a personalized deals hub, full of offers based around their cart.
A significant volume of sales was expected to come via search due to the amount of customers looking for money-off incentives around Christmas.
Team RevLifter secured PPC rights for a number of branded keywords and managed to bring hoards of deal-seeking traffic back onto Laithwaites’ site.
Results
- +55% increase in CVR vs coupon publishers (+40% above programme average)
- +39% increase in AOV vs coupon publishers (+41% above programme average)
- 200 sales driven within 48 hours of launching
Despite only having a month to build momentum, RevLifter became Laithwaites’ number-one publisher during the Christmas period. Its results surpassed all expectations around performance, and each of the original goals.
The campaign also generated a bank of data to power Laithwaites’ Q1/Q2 retargeting efforts, meaning even more sales were assisted by the page.
As for future plans, the expected adoption of the Rakuten Consumer Graph will enable customers to receive offers according to the date of their last order.
The strategy will aim to reduce churn and raise customer lifetime value as Laithwaites looks to create long-term benefits from its partnership with RevLifter.
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