DRIVING A +63% CONVERSION RATE FOR BOTANIC
Botanic
In France, 2019 marked one of the best years for the gardening sector in a decade. With revenue up +3.5% and 2020 kicking-off with a +27% increase in profits year on year, the industry was coming up roses.
The Brief
However, Covid-19 put an end to this momentum, with brands forced to close stores across the country. Once restrictions were eased, advertisers had to think of new ways to drive shoppers back through their doors. For French garden center Botanic, this was a great opportunity to stand out.
The Strategy
Botanic partnered with media agency Media Plus and Locala to raise awareness for their summer outdoor lines and food products, and increase their notoriety to drive shoppers to one of their 70 French stores. To do so, Locala came up with a custom drive-to-store strategy using mobile ad formats to reach the right audience at the right time.
To effectively convert shoppers to a store visit, we targeted four different groups with ads that matched their interest for a given product category. The first group was made of a diverse audience combining affluent users, competitors’ clients and Yuka users (a mobile app that gives information about a product’s health impact by scanning it). The other three targeted groups were more specific and consisted of ‘Decoration and DIY stores visitors’, ‘Gardening stores visitors’ and ‘Home improvement stores visitors’.
To give shoppers the best browsing experience, we leveraged the brand’s catalog to design 16 ad creatives highlighting 44 products, and adapted them to three different ad formats – resulting in 48 mobile creatives overall. Locala combined the interstitial, MPU and banner formats to give Botanic’s messaging a wider reach, allowing them to optimize towards the best return on ad spend while diversifying their ad display. Over 20 days, we used our Dynamic Catchment Area (DCA) tool and Fusio, our proprietary drive-to-store platform, to leverage users’ real-time location to deliver a live map with store directions to shoppers within a 20-minute car ride of Botanic garden centers.
At Locala, we don’t believe in marking our own homework. We utilized third party visitation data from independent partner Adsquare to measure visits to Botanic centers. These results were integrated into our platform to optimize the campaign in real time towards more brick-and-mortar store visits.
The Results
Botanic’s drive-to-store campaign generated outstanding business results. It delivered 11 million impressions – all fully rendered in a brand-safe environment. This exposure generated nearly 110,000 clicks on the store locator CTA and a meaningful 63% conversion rate, which translated into a 6% footfall uplift.
When it comes to visit distribution, Saturday was the best performing day with 18% of total in-store visits, and 25% of incremental visits were registered between 4 and 6PM throughout the week. Overall, 69% of Botanic centers received incremental visits generated by the campaign, with an average of 165 visits per day and 93 visits per store – which equated to 3 incremental visits per store per day. Among the total 70 Botanic garden centers, 15 stores stood out with over 100 incremental visits each.