Yes, you may turn to Staples for back-to-school supplies, but its bread and butter is in servicing the needs of the nation’s small-business owners.
A recent interesting story in AdExchanger documents the retailer’s experiment in figuring out how mobile impacted ultimate sales conversions.
“People know we sell paper, pens, ink and toner, but don’t always know we sell cleaning supplies and things for the break room or office facilities,” said Ellen Comley, VP of integrated media for Staples. “We wanted to make it where [our messaging] was less of a hard sell and more about bringing them into the brand promise in a more involved, fun way.”
According to AdExchanger, the result was a multiexecution mobile campaign, which Staples first brought to market in early 2015 in partnership with its agency Carat.
Carat and Staples developed two custom mobile units: “Slingshot,” an adver-gaming unit that allows small-business customers to swipe Staples products into shopping carts directly within the ad unit, and an interactive office calculator, which lets a customer calculate how much they’d save buying products at Staples when factoring in perks like free shipping.
“Slingshot was a playful game that we thought would help our SMB customer see the breadth and value of Staples’ products,” said Jay Poropatich, director of digital marketing for Staples. “But then ultimately we wanted to use that engagement to target those individuals with more of a direct-response ad unit.”
Then Xaxis-owned ActionX, a mobile retargeting platform, was hired by Carat and Staples to engage SMB customers through units like dynamic carousel ads beckoning them to “shop now.”
“The ability to find that individual, engage with them and then remarket our target audience, at the end of the day, was much more impactful than … push[ing] out corporate objectives to our customers,” said Poropatich. “In this instance, we were publishing programmatically as a means of activation while simply looking to engage our audience.”
what happened?
“The initial campaign results were positive. Eighty-five percent of Staples’ media spend went to mobile. And it determined through a media mix model and third-party cross-channel attribution that 75 percent of conversions happened in-store while 25 percent happened on desktop,” reports AdExchanger.
The story — worth a read in full — shows that partnerships and integrations can work a bit of magic.
To check it out, click here.