About our client
AliExpress is a leading e-commerce platform. Through its desktop website and apps, small businesses sell a wide range of products to consumers, from clothing and jewellery to toys and garden equipment.
In 2020, AliExpress in EMEA partnered with us to develop and implement a series of retargeting campaigns for 11.11, the most popular online shopping day in the world. The company was offering discounts between 70% to 80% and required a strategy for encouraging existing customers to visit their app and make a purchase.
We worked with Alexey Sobolev, who is the Senior User Growth Manager at AliExpress. He has been working in digital advertising for over six years and is responsible for AliExpress’s app marketing campaigns in Russia and CIS.
« Before the promotion, we did a lot of tests with Remerge to find the best strategies for promoting our products. We did a split test, adding two to six products on the creative, and then we chose the best-performing assets to use during the 11.11 sale. »
ALEXEY SOBOLEV, SENIOR USER GROWTH MANAGER, ALIEXPRESS
Campaigns for 11.11
Finding the best strategy for AliExpress in EMEA
AliExpress ran retargeting campaigns for 11.11 with us from July 2020 to November 2020. The aim was to boost the company’s Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) both before and after 11.11 by targeting users who had installed their app up to six months ago but had yet to make a purchase.
In the build-up to the holiday, we experimented with different creatives to identify the best-performing templates for the 11.11 sale. These were designed by our in-house Creative Services team and were continuously optimized based on the performance data we observed.
When asked about the process, Alexey explains, “Before the promotion, we did a lot of tests with Remerge to find the best strategies for promoting our products. We did a split test, adding two to six products on the creative, and then we chose the best-performing assets to use during the 11.11 sale.”
He then adds, “One of the other important things we did during this time was to increase the number of products in the feed. We started with one million and then optimized our internal capacities to scale our feed to six million items. This helped us significantly increase the number of ad impressions. These campaigns showed the biggest ROAS for us.”
Reach audiences more effectively
Retargeting is crucial for
e-commerce apps
For users who have provided their ID, retargeting remains a powerful way for e-commerce players to reach out to their audiences when they are on other apps. By analyzing an app’s audience behavior and working with its first-party data, demand-side platforms can create and show individuals personalized ads during peak shopping times, which encourage them to reinstall an app, re-engage with it, or make a purchase.
100% higher ROAS for 11.11 campaigns
To increase the gross merchandise volume (GMV) during 11.11, we collaborated with AliExpress to create a user segmentation list based on the product categories shoppers were interested in and items that were added to their cart or wishlist. Our analysts evaluated the data and then used the highest performing creatives built during the test phase to target audiences with specific products.
This proved to be an incredible success, with the campaigns showing much higher Click-Through Rates (CTR) and achieving a 100% increase in ROAS when compared to the campaigns that were running before the promotional period.
Retargeting insights for the future
From July to November 2020, AliExpress was also able to triple their budget with us and the company’s GMV saw a fourfold increase, “which means AliExpress became more profitable and the campaigns were optimized more effectively”, said Alexey Sobolev.
AliExpress Russia continues to use the insights gained from the test phase before 11.11 and the retargeting strategy implemented during this promotional period.
A selection of creative templates used during the test, along with the best performing templates from the 2020 11.11 sale, are still live today.
