Growing brand, growing workload
Rituals wants to help customers make their everyday beauty routines more meaningful and satisfying. Founded in 2000 as a single retail location in Amsterdam, the company has grown 50-60% per year, and is now one of the most widely used luxury bath and body companies in Europe.
Digital director Martijin van der Zee understood how important it was for his marketing team to keep pace with the brand’s rapid growth. He wanted to make sure that Rituals could continue to reach the right people at the right time, with messaging that was relevant to them — even on a larger scale.
"We have a loyal customer base, but our challenge is to reach new audiences in different countries,” says Martijn. “We want to make that process scalable and affordable."
The Rituals team had been manually building audiences based on customer website behavior and then reaching those audiences with personalized marketing campaigns. But as the Rituals brand grew in popularity around the world and began to offer more products, the amount of manual work that went into creating these audiences became excessive.
“It could take us weeks to build audiences for all of our campaigns,” says Martijn. As a solution, the Rituals team wanted to see if they could automate the process of creating audiences — giving them an approach that could scale with their business.
Automating audience creation
Rituals wanted to find new solutions that could help them accelerate the process of building audiences and optimize their campaigns to be more personalized and relevant to their customers. They also wanted to make sure that these audiences included customers who were mostly likely to buy.
“We wanted to reach people who were really interested in buying our products,” says Mattanja de Vries, Display Advertising Specialist at Rituals. “Our team was already using Google Marketing Platform to manage and optimize our marketing, so Conversion Probability in Analytics 360 was the perfect fit.”
Conversion Probability uses machine learning to evaluate dozens of signals like location, device, and more to predict how likely a user is to later convert. Instead of manually creating audiences based on different product IDs and categories as they had in the past, Mattanja and her team could now create their audiences based on the highest probability of conversion as calculated by Analytics 360. Then, the Rituals team shared these audiences to Display & Video 360 and created a campaign to reach them.
Business transformation
This automated audience strategy helped the Rituals team immediately see results. After launching a campaign to these new audiences, they saw an 85% increase in conversions and a 15% decrease in cost-per-acquisition.
Rituals isn’t stopping there, the team’s next goal is to scale this strategy even further. They are beginning to bring all of their first-party data from Google Marketing Platform, CRM systems, email, and point-of-sale onto Google Cloud so they can do further analysis. With Google Cloud’s advanced machine learning capabilities, they can build audiences that take into account both their online and offline sales data. Then, they plan to bring these audiences into Google Marketing Platform to further improve their marketing campaign performance.
“We are now doing everything audience-based and not only in the marketing channels but also on the website and in the future on the app,” says Martijn.
