It takes a bit of logical gymnastics to understand Indochino.com‘s latest media strategy: the custom menswear e-commerce site launched a Facebook campaign to drive customers to physical stores, with the goal of getting them to shop online.
That is to say it used an online tool to drive consumers to a real-world store so they could then better shop online. According to the company, the strategy worked.
“It very much preaches the omni-channel experience,” said Michael Macintyre, director of strategy at Indochino.
Back in June, the Vancouver-based company rolled out its Traveling Tailor pop-up shops in several U.S. markets. The events offer one-on-one tailor appointments, fabric selection and styling consultations. The idea is to take measurements of online customers who may not have the confidence of doing so themselves, and give them the tactile experience of selecting different fabrics.
For its spring and summer events, Indochino used Facebook’s new Custom Audience tool to get men off the couch and into the pop-op stores to get measured. The tool lets marketers target Facebook ads to specific contacts in their databases. Indochino also used the Lookalike Audience tool to reach people who resembled its existing customers.
Page post photo ads featured the address of the pop-up store as well as a link to Indochino’s booking engine. The ads were displayed in News Feeds on both mobile and desktop environments. In addition, working with data-service provider AdRoll, Indochino used Facebook Exchange to retarget people who had visited the Indochino site but had not booked an appointment.
Indochino said the campaign generated a 20-fold return on ad spend and had a 50% lower cost of generating an appointment compared to other marketing channels.
“One of the challenges for us entering all these new markets is to find the right targeted group of people to send our message to,” said Macintyre. “Facebook allows you to target a very specific audience and give them the right message at the right time. In that regard, it’s the best targeting for going into a new market as opposed to trying to figure out which local blogs work, or where the audience hangs out, or what they read.”
Macintyre said the company is using the tools again for upcoming Traveling Tailor events in Vancouver, Calgary and San Jose, Calif.
