British lifestyle brand Crew Clothing has partnered with full-funnel performance specialists Nest and Wunderkind, a performance marketing solution that scales one-to-one messages for retailers. Working with Nest to develop their paid social strategy, combined with Wunderkind for first-party data capture and triggered email marketing, Crew Clothing was able to optimise online performance, improving web traffic quality and retargeting of existing customers, to deliver a three-fold increase in purchases from new customers.
Established 25 years ago, Crew Clothing is the go-to British lifestyle brand for classic style with a coastal twist. As well as selling Direct To Consumer (DTC) via its ecommerce site and bricks-and-mortar estate of over 100 stores, the brand is also available via the Next, M&S and John Lewis platforms. In October 2023, it posted a 22% increase in like-for-like sales in its latest annual trading results, with turnover up to £101.3 million from £82.7 million in 2022.
As part of ambitions to scale digitally, Crew wanted to optimise its paid social strategy. Previously, Crew had been allocating a significant proportion of its paid social budget on targeting at the bottom of the funnel, with a focus on retention and retargeting. This meant that it wasn’t fully leveraging the channel for prospecting new shoppers – and was therefore losing out on the new customer acquisition essential for its growth plans.
Crew partnered with Nest to switch its paid social focus to scale new customer growth and raise awareness of the brand to new users. Nest shifted budget allocation to find the brand new, high-quality audiences, with efficient media buying and creative strategies that would ensure stable – and sustainable – revenue growth.
Ally Bradshaw, Digital and Customer Director, Crew Clothing commented: “We challenged Nest with scaling new customer acquisition using paid social – and it delivered a 3x increase in purchases from new customers in the first few months, by targeting our next best customers and driving traffic from untapped audiences.”
With Crew’s paid social activity now focused on acquisition, it wanted to make sure it was fully capitalising on this new traffic. It partnered with Wunderkind to identify a greater proportion of its non-logged-in website traffic, while implementing entrance and exit capture mechanisms to grow its addressable first-party customer database.
“It’s not just about driving traffic to our site,” Bradshaw continued. “It’s about what happens once they get there. This is where Wunderkind has played a crucial role. By capturing data and using it to nurture consumers, we have been able to provide a personalised shopping experience that keeps shoppers coming back. The data we gather through Wunderkind allows us to tailor our content and promotions to the individual needs and interests of each customer. The result is higher conversion rates, increased customer loyalty, and a greater sense of connection between Crew and the customer.”
By deploying Wunderkind’s Identity Network and on-site behavioural triggers, Crew significantly expanded the reach of their triggered email programme – enabling them to send personalised, 1:1 messages, at increased scale, based on intent signals including category, product and cart abandonment. The result was an 148% increase in revenue generation performance compared to Crew’s previous solution. 7.4% of Crew’s total digital revenue is now driven by Wunderkind.
“The combination of Nest’s strategy to scale traffic from untapped audiences using paid social, alongside Wunderkind’s optimised conversion of traffic, allowed us to scale our brand’s online channels efficiently,” Bradshaw concluded.
