Leading Cough, Cold and Flu brand taps into AI to deliver very healthy results

A major cough, cold and flu brand wanted to capitalize on the key CCF season to boost sales. To do so, it worked with wag’s Client Success team and the Insights team and leveraged wag’s years of sales data to identify the best customer cohorts to achieve its goals.

The wag team discovered that sales among regular customers were strong, but lapsed customers – those who had not bought CCF products for the past 52 weeks.

The team also researched new audience segments that would be likely to respond to the brand’s creative based on recent purchases and pricing and promotional behaviors.

Campaign Details:

To effectively identify customers who may be needing relief from winter colds and flus, wag recommended running a programmatic effort on the wagDSP.

wagDSP uses AI to find and target users based on historical and current actions, behaviors and interests, and purchases across 15,000 online publishers. With wagDSP, instore sales data from ~9k Walgreens locations is loaded every day at the ad server. That delivers faster abilities to optimize campaigns—the brand wouldn’t waste its investment by serving ads to customers who just bought CCF products. 

Strategic elements:

1. Win back customers: To hit sales goals, the brand needed to focus on previous cough, cold, and flu shoppers who had not made purchases in the past 52 weeks.
2. Test into new audiences: The campaign tested two custom audience segments, specifically Covid OTC buyers and high price sensitivity customers living in the southwest or north-central region.

The campaign was set to run from October to December and invested just under $250,000.

KPIs:

As this was a lower-funnel campaign, the brand wanted to evaluate the campaign's impact on all of its cough, cold, flu product sales. The KPIs: Total Brand Attributed Sales, ROAS, and Conversion Rate.

Results & Highlights:

The campaign achieved significant results, exceeding wag’s benchmarks and demonstrating its effectiveness in driving attributed sales and engagement.

Plus, leveraging wagDSP to test custom audience segments, especially the high price sensitivity segment, played a crucial role in achieving higher conversion rates and overall campaign success.

1. Total Brand Attributed Sales: $1.54M – over 6x the advertising investment
2. ROAS: $7.48 vs $6.00 H&W category benchmark
3. Conversion Rate: 4.43%, while the custom audience segments targeted achieved an even higher mark at 7+%. Signifying the efforts made on our Brand AI Tool optimized the brand’s ad dollars to yield to highest potential conversion marks.
4. Custom audience performance:  This ROAS was surely achieved by our high-performing custom audience segments both outpacing the category benchmark for conversion rates at 2.82% on our wagDSP. Covid OTC buyers achieving a 7% conversion rate while the high price sensitivity segment, tested with the geo-overlay, stood out with an impressive conversion rate of 9.28%. This indicated that our team targeting these custom audience segments was a successful approach.

The bottom line:

By clearly defining ‘lapsed’ customer and identifying new audience segments that aligned with the cough, cold, flu customer habits, and in leveraging the wagDSP to efficiently and effectively identify potential customers offsite,  the brand outperformed the H&W benchmark and surpassed sales goals for its season.