BAM boosts turnover with change to ad approach

By

Sandra Halliday

Published
Apr 17, 2019

Ethical clothing retailer BAM said this week that it has changed its advertising approach and has seen an extra £0.7 million in revenue as a result, as well as winning 18,000 new customers and seeing a 30% uplift in customers making a second purchase. It also said that it logged a 9% increase in orders per person and enjoyed a 20% rise in site visits after customers had seen a BAM ad.

BAM sells bamboo-based clothing and in an increasingly eco- and ethically-driven consumer environment it has a strong story to tell. But making sure that story gets to the right consumers isn’t always easy. The company said that its new approach of targeted online advertising uses Conversant’s CRM Media Solution to show a mixture of brand, offer and product ads, “customised to the individual viewer and providing a much more relevant advertising experience.”

We’ve heard a lot about how personalisation is what consumers want from brands but this is one of the few tangible examples of that having a measurable impact that we’ve seen so far.

The brand, which was founded by former pole vault athlete and explorer David Gordon, had previously focused on ‘running re-targeting’. That’s the process that looks at what a consumer has searched for previously and follows them around with more of the same, which is something consumers don’t really like and can also mean they’re being offered marketing messages about a product they might have already purchased.

The company struggled to measure ROI for its advertising efforts when it did this and realised the need to align its retention and acquisition strategies across online and offline, so looked for tech solutions that could help it to personalise its marketing in a more sophisticated way.

Steve Newman, e-commerce Manager at BAM, said: “In the old days it was pretty straightforward. The customer saw an ad, used an offer code, and your cost of acquisition was very easy to work out. For digital display, I had been used to working with the mentality of the banner and the creative – that how it looks is not as important as getting the click. But we’ve evolved beyond that now – just looking at the different touchpoints of how customers are interacting shows you can’t take a single journey anymore. The trick is to find a model that gives credit where credit is due.”