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Title of the piece
Lorem ipsum ergo sum this is a caption blurb about the article.
Title of the piece
Lorem ipsum ergo sum this is a caption blurb about the article.
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23 november 2021
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ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE IN PARTNERSHIP WITH YOUTUBE ADVERTISING
By Sean Hargrave
The first Covid lockdown was a challenge for all retailers but it posed a particular challenge for Currys PC World. Like all stores in the technology and home appliances sector, it had to close physical outlets and serve customers online. The problem was, the brand’s consumer proposition has always been the deep level of knowledge its staff can pass on to help customers make more informed purchase choices.
The idea for an online ‘ShopLive’ service, where experts could provide customer assistance through a video chat window, had been under consideration for some time. However, as bricks-and-mortar stores were forced to close, those plans had to be accelerated while Currys PC World simultaneously sought ways to keep up with online demand for home appliances and technology.
Access to technology became more crucial than ever during lockdown due to the twin challenges of home schooling and working from home. It made many people realise they needed to buy new kit or upgrade existing laptops, tablets, mobile phones and routers. At the same time, people who were fortunate enough to remain in work throughout the pandemic were not able to spend money on going out, so many chose to upgrade technology, such as home entertainment equipment and kitchen appliances. The obvious problem was that the store they usually visited for advice was shut.
How Currys PC World took targeting to the next level to launch its video chat service
In one of retail’s toughest years, Currys PC World turned to YouTube to rapidly scale awareness of its ShopLive online service and then supercharge the efficiency of credit customer acquisition through Trueview for Action.
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Dan Rubel, brand and marketing director at Currys PC World, now rebranded as Currys, reveals that, against a backdrop of surging demand, it had to move at speed to make people aware they could buy from the store and receive expert advice through its ‘assisted purchase’ service online.
“We had to step up very quickly last spring,” he recalls. “Our secret has always been the knowledge of our colleagues in-store providing an assisted service, in contrast to a lot of other retailers who rely on customers to do their own research and buy without any assistance.”
“We had the idea for ShopLive but it was on the back burner, until we stepped up to make it happen in a few weeks rather than the six- to nine-month development window initially set aside. People were going online to make big decisions on tech and home appliances and so we wanted to be able to help them make the right decision online, just as we do in-store.”
The ShopLive online service was accompanied by a new contactless order-and-collect service to accompany home deliveries. Customers who wanted to pick up items in person were given a QR code to scan, to tell Currys PC World they were parked outside a store with their boot open. Staff would then place items in their boot to ensure the order was completed in a socially distanced manner.
Pivoting to online assistance
Lessons from more targeted campaigns
For Rubel there were several learnings from the campaigns. The most obvious was that the company had only just started to scratch the surface of targeting that delivers improved cost per acquisition.
“Quite often you can find clever targeting or personalisation gets done for the sake of it; it doesn’t always work,” he says. “Nothing gets a free pass with us. We try a lot of approaches and we’re fine when it doesn’t work because at least we’ve tried it. But with these campaigns we realised that we have only just scratched the surface and that we now need to double down our focus on testing and using data to target.”
This is prompting Currys to investigate whether it can refine future campaigns by identifying audiences who are not only interested in the wide categories of tech or home appliances, but who are actively researching a specific item. This would mean it could deliver ads for the right type of product to the people who are in-market to buy it.
Additionally, the big learning for Currys, other than the power of data in targeting, has been that marketing teams can work with colleagues in other departments to deliver campaigns and new services in a much quicker time frame.
“The speed of innovation under lockdown was incredible. When we all stepped up to the mark, the pace we could move at was astounding,” he says.
“I have been in rooms with CMOs talking about delivering a new campaign in six weeks and I’ve been thinking, we were building new campaigns in just a day or two. I think that agility, that moving at a pace we would never have dreamed of previously, is going to help us move faster in the future and give us a real competitive advantage over rivals. By moving beyond retargeting we’ve opened a new frontier in marketing effectiveness.”
The past year and a half has left the retailer well placed, Rubel believes, not only to work with greater agility but also to up its game on targeting. With the approach of the Black Friday and Christmas buying season, always the busiest time of the year, he believes Currys will now be able to reach out to audiences that are far more defined than ever before. ■
“The speed of innovation under lockdown was incredible. When we all stepped up to the mark, the pace we could move at was astounding”
And YouTube is in a league of its own compared to the other alternatives. ■
— Dan Rubel, Currys
With the new service in place and working well, the Currys PC World marketing team decided it needed to reassure customers they could still shop there during lockdown. At the same time, the brand wanted to communicate the benefits of the new ShopLive service.
The business weighed up its options and decided a video campaign would allow it to bring the offering to life. The decision to opt for YouTube was taken because it allowed Currys PC World to reach its target audiences both at scale and, crucially, at speed. The campaign formed two phases - spring and summer of 2020 and then Black Friday and Christmas - as Rubel explains.
“In the first phase campaign we wanted to let people know that we were still available to them and that we understood the importance of the role of technology in their lives,” he says.
“We had three creatives in this phase. One conveyed the message we were open, the second showed we understood the importance of technology in people’s lives, and then we wanted to let people know they could get advice from us online through our ShopLive service. We’re fortunate to have rich data reserves and when we combine them with targeting from YouTube it’s very powerful. We could target people whose online behaviour revealed they were interested in our [product] categories.”
Communicating change with customers
The ShopLive service replaced in-store assistance during lockdown
The aim in phase one was around communication and awareness, to reassure customers Currys PC World was still there for them, and so YouTube’s TrueView in-stream format was chosen. It is charged on a cost-per-view basis, meaning the brand only paid for prospects who watched an advert. The campaigns attracted a view-through rate (VTR) three times higher than Currys PC World would normally expect.
The success of phase one prompted Currys PC World to undertake a second phase as the brand ambition moved from awareness to customer acquisition. This part of the campaign was aimed at customers who were likely to be looking to buy on credit and went live in October 2020, in the run up to Black Friday and Christmas. To reach its target audience at scale, Currys PC World combined its first-party data with machine learning and AI tools in the Google Cloud Platform, to build a propensity model that revealed people most likely to be interested in buying through credit.
This smarter use of data was not the only aspect that changed in the second phase. Currys PC World also switched from TrueView in-stream, used in phase one for awareness at scale, to TrueView for Action. TrueView for Action is charged on a cost per acquisition and fitted in with Currys PC World’s focus on moving from awareness to acquisition, from spreading the word that it was still open to winning new customers looking to fund tech purchases through credit.
“The propensity modelling used in our credit campaign helped us build on our own data to find similar ‘lookalike’ audiences, and that led to a very positive improvement in cost per acquisition compared to previous digital marketing campaigns,” Rubel says.
“It helped us define and then reach target audiences we may not have identified otherwise.”
Encouraging results