wag’s three-year partnership with an internationally known beauty brand is grounded in a test-and-learn approach that allows teams to continually look for new areas of opportunity to drive trial, sales, and loyalty.

The results? A 134% increase in ROAS and a 26% decrease in impressions – a significant increase in efficiency and effectiveness that allows their marketing budgets to go further. This case study shows how out-of-the-box thinking on cross-category shopping behaviors created a new customer base for the brand – and a new audience that any wag advertiser can leverage.

A unique “beauty” routine

Over the years, the brand’s beauty campaigns with wag have applied their foundation the same way: seeking to understand which customer cohorts offer the greatest opportunity to achieve their goals and ultimately drive year-over-year sales growth.

wag’s Insights Team taps data from myWalgreens, Walgreens’ customer loyalty program and a deep, rich data resource that includes both recent and historical purchases. wag analysts build a full picture of customer behavior and purchasing to pinpoint the customer cohorts to achieve brand goals based on:

• Robust omnichannel views (instore and online) of customer behaviors and purchases

• Consumer behaviors across multiple categories, brands, and SKUs

• 109M+ members of myWalgreens Customer Loyalty program -- a deep and fresh data set that includes nearly one-third of U.S. consumers

• Views into media preference and responsiveness

Big data is beautiful

The wag Insights team starts with the obvious: what is happening with customers in the endemic category. 

Beauty is one of Walgreens largest categories. 40M+ beauty customers make 92M+ million trips – driving sales of $1B+ a year. By itself, this cohort of shoppers offers beauty brands an enormous opportunity to reach, engage and convert new customers. 

The brand’s beauty customers made up a large share of Walgreens’ beauty buyers. They bought regularly, were responsive to the brand’s advertising and were loyal to the brand. 

To spur growth and sales, the team needed to broaden the search for opportunities beyond their current customers and their endemic category. 

Because the ‘self-care’ trend – a broadening of behaviors from how customers take care of themselves to how they feel about themselves – has been growing rapidly, the team decided to look for cross category, or “adjacent” products in the Health & Wellness category.

Specifically, they were looking for H&W products that would play a role in beauty, e.g.:

• Vitamins for hair, skin and/or nail 

• Eye care solutions, like redness and brightening solutions

• Cough/Cold lip products with shades or tints 

The insights team found 66M potential “new” customers who were making trips to purchase these ‘adjacent’ health and wellness products, but not beauty products. 

The team also drilled down to what was happening on customers’ shopping trips. Many more were not buying beauty items when they were buying these types of adjacent H&W products. 

That was the key to attaining new customers and growing sales for the brand.   

The bridge to beauty

The wag data science and insights team proposed building a brand-new custom advance audience, called “H&W/Bridge to Beauty”. This audience captures those customers who are making H&W adjacent product purchases that signal they are excellent candidates to “basket build” for the brand.

Before a national campaign was rolled out, the new custom audience was tested via in-store displays in beauty and H&W aisles.

The results? A lift in customers cross-purchasing H&W and Beauty products.

The teams rolled out the campaign to target the audience via digital channels. Given their need for reach—and the roll out of a new audience segment—wag’s planning team recommended:

Programmatic via wagDSP

• wag’s proprietary programmatic service works extremely well with the predictive nature of advanced audiences and it can optimize down to the SKU-level transaction data

Social and search

• wag’s high match rates on the largest social and search platforms helped the brand drive relevant reach and eliminate waste. Display, keyword and shopping products were included.

Onsite

• The brand ran “always-on” sponsored ad placements on Walgreens.com site and mobile app for a variety of products. 

By expanding to this and other cross-category audiences and by executing a multi-channel ad campaign, the brand ultimately saw a $13.01 ROAS. 

Today, the “Health & Wellness/Bridge to Beauty” audience is available for advertisers both digitally and instore, via wagDSP/managed service, which spans CTV, social, search, streaming audio and other channels; self-service through The Trade Desk and OpenX; and instore couponing.