Why did we invent “lifecycle” for display?

Find out why lifecycle is the only transparent, ethical way to deliver campaigns – and why we pioneered it for display.

Lifecycle marketing isn’t a new concept. But brands have always struggled to implement it properly in display, because traditionally they have used different companies for different solutions, such as branding, prospecting and retargeting.

They’ve also had to fall back on formats such as email to try and generate and grow customer lifetime value, thanks to out-dated tracking mechanisms used in display that have a lifetime of 0-30 days on current browser versions.

And users of digital devices, now nearly everyone, every day, deserve transparency in how their data is used and the ability to filter out unnecessary noise.

Lifecycle relies on a cohesive process

For lifecycle to work, and ensure that you’re giving the right message to the right person at the right time, it needs to be a cohesive process across every part of the customer engagement to deliver consented relevant advertising.

In the same way you carefully curate your other offline and online engagements, the same should be done when executing through display.

At Crimtan, we recognised the importance of a joined-up process, and pioneered lifecycle marketing for display. This has enabled us to deliver industry-leading results for our clients. Take a look at how we achieved a 9:1 ROI for Moss Bros over a bleak festive period for other retailers. And how we delivered an impressive 47% new customer rate for Miss Selfridge.

How lifecycle enables us to deliver industry-leading rates

So how did we achieve results like these when other retailers were experiencing their “worst February in a decade”, and a festive season that saw a 3.1% drop in Boxing Day shoppers, and 75% clothing discounts before the peak shopping season?

From the outset in our campaigns, we make sure we align our creative planning to our client’s trade and marketing plan. We believe that all the effort put into keeping the website, email and social messaging fresh and vibrant that the display channel should be no different.

Then, using our lifecycle marketing display strategy, we find new customers, move prospectors to conversion, and grow customer lifetime value. Our campaigns are creative led, but data driven, and designed specifically to find completely new customers, but also to increase existing customer lifetime value.

To maximise the ROI between finding new customers and prospecting them to conversion, we split the budget in our campaigns carefully split between new customers, prospecting to conversion and growing lifetime value.

And to fully calculate incrementality, we also deliver a control group. This is a subset of all the audience intelligence and investment intelligence, but instead of leveraging the creative intelligence we do not serve ad which delivers the call to action. This has been proven as statistically significant by a two-tailed test.

Lifecycle is the only transparent, ethical way to deliver campaigns

For us, lifecycle display is the only transparent, ethical way to deliver campaigns. It’s why we developed the unique process, and have used it for every campaign.

We can only grow lifetime value by focusing on moving beyond cookies (the tracking mechanism used in most personalisation) and truly focus on what we believe delivers the difference: “consented relevant advertising”.

Cookies and how they are used is really where the mistrust between the industry and the end customer and one of the core focuses of Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention Algorithm (ITP) and also the ePrivacy Regulation already penned and current scheduled for adoption in 2020.

Ultimately, advertising needs to be a collaboration between us, the client and their customers – delivering advertisements that are useful, not creepy and annoying and follow you wherever you go.

We strive to fully support the rights of individuals under new legislation, and believe that transparency is key in any successful relationship in business. To deliver relevant advertising we need to build trust in how and what we are using data for, and it is by working alongside our clients as partners we can achieve this.

We’d love to help you achieve improved results too

Both Moss Bros and Miss Selfridge were delighted with the incremental results our lifecycle display campaigns delivered – and continue to deliver today.

And the great thing about our lifecycle display approach is that it’s industry agnostic. So as well as helping brands like Moss Bros increase their retail sales by 27.8% year-on-year (in a difficult market), we’re seeing equally impressive results in travel, finance, and property.

If you’d like to learn more about how we’re helping brands improve their display advertising results – and what we can do for you, please get in touch with your local Crimtan office