Digital Marketing Case Study : Online Fashion Portal “LIPSY LONDON”

About Lipsy London

Lipsy is an online and offline clothing store based out of UK. It also has a wholesale business which runs via franchise partners. It specializes in women’s apparel and celebrity fashion. Additionally, it licenses products in  categories including fragrance, cosmetics, accessories, watches and shoes. It also has a wholesale model and its customers include Robinsons in Singapore, Debenhams and ASOS in UK and Myer in Australia. In this case study, we cover their digital marketing campaign for increases direct revenues via their online site.

Lipsy Business Objectives

• Generating high online revenues by increasing traffic to its website.
• Becoming a major online fashion player and increase their brand recognition.
• Widening the awareness for Lipsy’s product range, and expanding in Europe, the US, Australia and South Africa. They had traditionally been strong in women’s apparels, but now they wanted to tap the other product categories as well.

Strategy adopted by Lipsy

Lipsy’s customer base is multicultural and multi-lingual. They decided to build their campaign in a highly localized way based on deep research of customer behaviour across different markets. To enable this, they developed proprietary social media research tools that include linguistic profiling. Analytics done on top of the data collected through these tools revealed how Lipsy’s potential customers really behave online. It and provided deep insights into their search patterns and language preferences. These insights were used to design their SEO and SEM strategies. For example, their display campaigns and creatives were highly customized to the local audience. Models were chosen on the basis of ethnic preferences of the region. The collected data was used to build a campaign strategy that engaged consumers at different stages of their buying cycle and they cut down on repetitive persuasion which was found to be wasteful. They realized that repeated impressions were burning more money but were not really adding to brand recognition.

• A special creative team was set up to design the online banner campaign. This team was passed very specific inputs from the collected data enabling them to build creatives as per the language and appearance of Lipsy’s target audience.
• In different regions, customers were using a very different natural search strategy. They were using their own local keywords and slangs for the search. At other times, they were using keywords based on local celebrities. Lipsy built target content and revised their product names and descriptions, as well as added blogs to be more SEO friendly. Their organic search rankings improved by leaps and bounds. They hired local Digital Marketing agencies on a contract basis. These local agencies worked under the direction of the internal Digital Marketing teams, all the while using the data from their in-house linguistic tools and profiling.
• They also ran an online PR campaign that focused on building an association with locally popular sites and built many backlinks. This increased their organic traffic.
• The paid search strategy leveraged used platforms like google and facebook. The five main keyword segments they targeted were: Lipsy brand terms, product-specific keys, competitor related terms, generic keys and ‘Lipsy Sphere’ terms specially targeted at Lipsy’s online community.

• All these were merged with Lipsy’s corporate communications strategy to keep the brand’s external messaging very consistent across its own customer profile, language and taste.

Results

• Lipsy’s online sales increased by a mind-boggling number of 350%
• Lipsy attracted 1500 new users to their website within a month. Overall, they had 8000 users in total which was beyond expectations for the size of a company like Lipsy.
• Just with the display campaign, they could increase their revenues by 40% and also reduce the costs by 40%.
• The clicks on their paid advertisements increased by 10%.
• CPC decreased by 50% in the first month.

Learnings

• A global company like Lipsy has to have a local appeal to its online campaign, at the same time preserving its international branding and messaging. IN different regions people obviously use different languages and search terms. Invest in extensive research and data analysis to figure out the behaviour and search patterns of your target customers.
• Depending on the above decide upon the most appropriate creatives or online marketing channels which can give the maximum ROI.
• Associate the company with well-thought brands or other companies in the industry to arrive at the right positioning. (In this case,  “Lipsy” wanted to associate with high-quality brands).
• Choose an appropriate personality as a brand ambassador. In this case, Lipsy chose “Fleur East” as its brand ambassador. She is of London origin, a singer, a dancer, a songwriter, a rapper and a fitness model. She could help Lipsy connect its fashion with her music concerts and reaching out to her huge number of followers.
• Showcasing different dresses on models from various ethnic backgrounds hence covering up the maximum audience worldwide.

Photo Credits: lipsy.co.uk