Finding new audiences during COVID-19

Who are you?

PrettyLittleThing is a fashion, beauty and lifestyle brand built on setting trends rather than following them. Our customers are part of the online-savvy shopping generation, and with hundreds of new products dropping daily, PrettyLittleThing is fast fashion accelerated. We demystify style and bring the runway to real life, making style accessible to all, whatever your budget.

We work with some of the most high-profile talent and influencers in the industry who support us in driving our brand forward and creating awareness whilst acting as our ambassadors. We’ve collaborated with celebrities including Kourtney Kardashian, Ashley Graham, Hailey Baldwin, Saweetie, Teyana Taylor and Little Mix. PLT customers put their trust in us for everything from trend led pieces, celebrity-inspired looks, the latest news, beauty trends and everyday wardrobe staples to that ultimate party piece.

What was your challenge?

With the e-commerce market in the US seeing incredible pace of change over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we needed to find ways to make data-led decisions about where our marketing spend would be most effective. As the COVID-19 pandemic developed, the retail sector as a whole was faced with reduced budgets and something of a marketing standstill. We had noticed an upturn in marketplace sentiment in the US and needed to better understand US consumer behavior if we were going to reach new customers who might not have shopped with us before.

We wanted to take a data-driven approach to successfully navigate through the global pandemic, whilst simultaneously ensuring that those Americans interested in the PrettyLittleThing brand were able to find and purchase the products they wanted, despite the ongoing issue of COVID-19. Above all, we wanted these new customers’ experience of PrettyLittleThing to be as personalized and as relevant as possible.

What did Peak do?

Peak leveraged our existing customer data with its AI platform and Customer Intelligence application suite, analyzing our current US customer base and identifying what a ‘good’ PrettyLittleThing US customer looked like. By taking a data-first approach, Peak was able to identify potential high-value PLT customers, taking into account factors such as product preferences, average order values and frequencies, and propensity to purchase.

With this insightful AI-powered view, we were able to take our US targeting to the next level, serving highly-personalized social advertising campaigns that were optimized to drive high lifetime values amongst lookalikes of our current high-value customers.

What’s the upshot?

The initial aim of this work was to achieve brand awareness and reach new audiences in the US, rather than to specifically drive conversions. However, the results we achieved were far above and beyond what we initially expected – so much so that the campaign (originally running over a weekend) is still active today.

Peak’s AI-powered advertising techniques have allowed us to achieve some key results in a very short space of time. These include an increase in new customer acquisition, a higher number of sessions on site, and a huge improvement in campaign click-through-rates. Peak continuously refreshes our AI-powered customer data view regularly, ensuring that every ad we serve is as relevant to our audience as possible.

What’s next?

So far, our advertising work with Peak has focused largely on identifying ideal customer profiles and personas. The next phase, however, will be to expand our use of Peak’s predictive capabilities to better serve our customers with the right messages at the right time. As well as this, we’re also going to be exploring introducing AI into our Google advertising, using Peak’s Ad Optimization solution, to help enable our ad spend to go as far as possible.