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How Bravissimo harnessed the weather to boost online sales with weatherFIT
Category: Sales and Marketing | 03 January, 2013 11:32
The Challenge
Bravissimo Ltd is a specialist lingerie and clothing retailer, with 21 stores nationwide and a strong online presence. Today, online sales represent over 50% of its total sales revenues, making this channel a core element of the company’s continued success.
Since 2010, Bravissimo had been working with award-winning digital marketing solutions company, Fast Web Media, to successfully boost its organic and paid-for online search profile to generate a year-on-year increase in site visits and sales.
To help promote some of Bravissimo’s seasonal product lines, such as swimwear, Fast Web Media suggested that Bravissimo trial the use of a new solution it had developed: weatherFIT. This is a cloud solution that seamlessly integrates with Google Adwords, acting as a wraparound for existing online PPC campaigns and enabling them to be adjusted in real time by taking into account local weather data.
weatherFIT helps companies and brands to quickly capitalise on weather-related opportunities, tailoring their online adverts and promotions to suit prevailing conditions and help to drive more traffic to websites, in turn driving sales.
Adjusting campaigns to fit the weather
The UK’s weather conditions are proven to have an effect on public buying habits, influencing their buying decisions for everything from clothes and food, to cars and holidays. According to accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the poor weather earlier in 2012 contributed to an increase in insolvencies, with 426 UK retailers going bust between April and June 2012, compared with 386 a year ago. Similarly, the hospitality and leisure sector saw 332 insolvencies during the same period. Adverse weather conditions are also known to drive increases in online travel sales, which grew 17% year over year in June 2012.
weatherFIT gives almost any company a way to build local weather conditions and forecasts into its online campaigns, helping them to promote the right products or services in the most appropriate way, and at the right time to boost conversion rates and sales.
The Strategy
Bravissimo recognised the need to explore new online marketing methods to help increase its PPC (pay-per-click) revenues across its seasonal campaigns. The company decided to trial weatherFIT for two of its campaigns - its swimwear range and its Pepperberry-branded range of dresses – in a three-month campaign running through March, April and May 2012, in the run-up to the critical spring and summer holiday season.
The software was seamlessly integrated with Bravissimo’s Google Adwords campaigns for its swimwear and dresses ranges, enabling the PPC campaigns to be adjusted in real time by taking into account local weather data. The software allowed Bravissimo to tailor its online promotions and advertisements to suit the browser, based on the individual web browser’s location and the weather conditions local to that individual.
The Results
PPC-driven sales revenues for Bravissimo’s swimwear range increased by nearly 600% during the 3-month campaign using weatherFIT, compared with the same three-month period in 2011. There was an increase in the conversion rate of browsers to buyers of 103%. The swimwear sales were achieved despite the fact that 2012 has been one of the wettest years ever recorded in the UK.
Alongside its swimwear campaign, the use of weatherFIT to support PPC campaigns for Bravissimo’s ‘Pepperberry’ branded dress range saw a sales increase of 77.95%, and an increase in average order size of 77.96% compared with the same three-month period in 2011, when weatherFIT was not used.
These sales increases far exceed the average growth in the UK online retail sales of 18.3% during March, April and May 2012, according to the Office of National Statistics.
Fiona Lomas, Senior Marketing Manager at Bravissimo Ltd, said: “The results of our first campaigns using weatherFIT really speak for themselves, helping us to drive a major increase in PPC revenues. Using it to fine-tune our PPC advertising and promotions by taking into account local weather conditions really boosted sales in the crucial run-up to the holiday season – especially as the poor weather earlier in the year meant that consumers were spending more time at home. We will certainly continue to use weatherFIT as part of our online campaigns strategy.”