McCabes Social & Email Case Study

THE CHALLENGE

The 2021 Black Friday period posed both challenges and opportunities for McCabes Pharmacy. One of those challenges was establishing and maintaining YoY growth given the extraordinary performance of the 2020 Black Friday campaign during the pandemic. We knew we had to establish an innovative integrated campaign with first party data at the forefront to achieve our performance targets.

OUR STRATEGY

We knew the key to driving growth this Black Friday was to exclusively focus on integrating their digital channels to create a seamless omni-channel experience for customers. We achieved this by identifying clear objectives:

Find the right incentive. We created an exciting “Early Access” hook to the Black Friday sale, while tying the creative in with what we would eventually use in the rest of our Black Friday imagery.
Prioritise collecting first party data on social media during the weeks leading up to Black Friday week. We created a Facebook lead generation campaign targeting users already warmed up to the McCabes brand but who weren’t on our email list just yet.
Create innovative email campaigns. We used a mix of newsletters and automated emails to nurture new subscribers gathered from social and website forms. Subscribers received early access to discounts, driving loyalty. We re-engaged this audience throughout the week with sales emails focused on top performing categories.

INNOVATION USED

This campaign relied on the sharing of first party data between digital channels to generate results. By using social media to grow our email list, using segmentation to show subscribers the right message at the right time, and the use of a combination of conversion focused Email and Social campaigns to convert subscribers, we were able to create a seamless conversion journey without having to rely on third party cookies. Our email campaigns included innovative design elements such as new Black Friday templates and real-time countdown clocks. On Social we used first party data to create high-intent lookalike audiences which we targeted with our upper funnel campaigns.

BUSINESS GROWTH

Our initial paid social lead gen strategy paid off and resulted in us striking gold in terms of signups! In total, we drove 1,300 newsletter signups ahead of the sale. Email generated a whopping +1,102% YoY revenue lift, with 7.4% of total website revenue coming from email. Social recorded +293% YoY revenue growth through targeting email subscribers and lookalikes with conversion campaigns. The campaign recorded a CPL of just €1.16; This is 74% below the current industry average.

During a period where many retailers struggled with growth vs 2020, McCabes managed to continue growing in 2021, showing how their investment in digital and first party data paid off!

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What our clients say

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"In the past, we struggled to find the right hook to engage our audience and keep them watching our social content. Working with Raven and the Wolfgang team gave us valuable insights into how to utilise trends, editing techniques, and audio elements to capture attention, retain viewership and boost engagement. These lessons are shaping how we approach all our in-house content, and we’re confident this style will have a big impact on our future campaigns.”

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Simon Staunton

Social Media Manager, Intersport Elverys

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