4 Ways Perfume Brands Can Utilize Customer Information From DTC Sales
Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) sales indicate any sale that came in through your website or any other owned-channel. Being able to collect customer information (and also collecting email leads) provides a huge opportunity. This is in stark contrast to getting sales through retail and wholesalers, where the perfume brand is not able to gather customer information. We have discussed here why DTC revenue should be prioritized in your perfume business. Now we want to explore specific strategies you can use with the customer data that you collect, in order to run more effective perfume advertising campaigns.
Email Marketing for Perfume
The highest leverage marketing activity you can run with the customer information that you collect is email marketing. It is the only marketing channel where you do not have to pay to reach customers and leads. We know through perfume consumer buying trends that the average person buys a new fragrance every 123 days. Through email marketing, you can effectively time your promotions based on this frequency.
Your email marketing strategy should encompass much more than just promotions. A full-cycle email marketing campaign can build excitement for new product releases, emotionally connect consumers to your brand, and help run more effective brand collaborations.
Uploading Emails for Retargeting Ads
Both Facebook and Google allow you to upload email lists. These platforms then match the emails to their data base. This allows you to run retargeting ads specifically to these audience segments. This gives you numerous options.
If the audience segment is from previous customers, then you can run ads to them based on when you anticipate they will likely buy again or for other products they didn’t buy (but maybe they added a product to their cart). In general, previous customers will convert at a higher rate than users who are unfamiliar with your brand.
If the audience segment is based on collected emails from leads, then you are essentially using retargeting ads to a warm audience, meaning, users who visited your website and are already familiar with your brand. You can narrow the retargeting audience further by only targeting website visitors who completed certain actions on your site such as viewing a product page. This granular targeting ensures that you are retargeting engaged audiences who are more likely to have purchase intent.
Direct Mail
When you have the customer’s physical address, it opens the door for direct mail advertising campaigns as well as strengthening your brand's connection with customers. A direct mail campaign can include a follow-up mailer that:
introduces them to other perfumes in your collection
talks about new brand initiatives
mailing out sample perfume bottles
provide a discount code for the next order
brand origin story
Identifying Profitable Geo Locations
Depending on the ecommerce platform that you run your website on, you can run an analysis of where your orders are coming from. Running paid advertising on Google or Facebook will also show you the locations of orders in-platform, which can be helpful in guiding where to allocate your advertising spend. When you have a large enough sample size, this data becomes a lot more meaningful in showing you trends that you can leverage for more effective advertising.
Signals to Look For With DTC Orders
Having a stockist of retail locations carrying your perfumes has obvious benefits. One benefit that rarely gets discussed is the ‘Halo Effect’ in regards to omnichannel marketing. In the context of perfume advertising and retail stores, the Halo Effect can be defined as an increase in website traffic for a brand when the brand opens up a retail store, or when a brand gets its products added to a large retailer.
If you are a perfume brand that notices a geographic cluster of sales happening, this should prompt you to take a deeper look.
Do we have a retail presence near this cluster of sales? If we do, it signifies that expanding our retail distribution can also help our DTC channel. It can also signify that a geo-targeted advertising campaign that focuses on geo’s that we have a retail presence in might be more effective than non-geo targeted advertising campaigns.
Does the cluster of DTC sales exist in an area where you are running more paid advertising or Out-of-Home advertising?
Do you notice any demographic trends in the areas where your brand is getting more sales?
Do you notice any patterns in the retailers or lack thereof in the geographic area?