Leveraging content to optimize acquisition and remarketing

Background

As one of America’s most iconic brands, Macy’s has grown from the originator of the department store in 1858, to a leader in the mobile shopping space. 

Over the decades Macy’s evolved to meet the needs of their shoppers, from brick and mortar, to catalogue, to web, and to mobile to become a truly omnichannel retailer serving today’s omnichannel customer. 

With mobile shining as their fastest growing channel bringing in over $1 billion in annual sales, top leadership invested a significant portion of their technology expenditure into creating a best-in-class mobile app. 

Their mobile product managers focused on making the core functionality unbeatable before adding flashy add-ons, an ethos also embraced by the Macy’s marketing team. They understood that core messaging targeted at adoption and engagement was paramount to their success, not gimmicky campaigns that generate clicks that didn’t lead to sales.

Challenge

Macy’s marketing team needed to scale adoption of their mobile app to increase engagement and purchases. 

Many customers were part of their loyalty program, but did not use mobile as part of their habitual purchasing behavior. To activate these valuable loyalty users the team focused on overhauling their remarketing efforts, as it was far more cost effective to run remarketing campaigns than paid acquisition campaigns.

Their owned content also performed very well, and was a key growth lever for Macy’s, including email, web, push, and direct mail. This meant they had to be careful that their paid media wasn’t cannibalizing their organic traffic, ensuring that investment was going to be revenue positive. 

This combination of a fully optimized acquisition and remarketing strategy could dramatically reduce costs and increase overall revenue.

Solution

Data from AppsFlyer’s attribution suite gave the team an omnichannel view of their campaign performance, revealing some key areas of optimization in their quest to improve mobile adoption and engagement for both remarketing and acquisition. AppsFlyer connects to over 10,000 partners, including all of Macy’s media partners, by leveraging AWS cloud computing and API solutions.

For example, they found that paid search outperformed display by a significant margin. This meant the team could focus their paid spend on search and social.

By leveraging AppsFlyer’s customer experience and engagement suite for their deep linking, the Macy’s growth team was able to connect the dots when it came to owned media, measuring campaign performance down to the event level – including sign up, add items to cart, make a purchase, etc. This level of granularity meant the team now could take their learnings and optimize their strategy at the top of the funnel accordingly.

Margaret Dorsman, a Marketing Brand Manager at Macy’s commented on the importance of AppsFlyer for their growth objectives noting:

“AppsFlyer attribution data gave us insight into both our acquisition and remarketing efforts so we could optimize in order to realize a substantial increase in engagement and revenue.”

Results

Year over year, Macy’s realized a 30% increase in total sessions and a 68% increase in purchases. 

This resulted in a 55% increase in total mobile revenue, including a 100% uplift of revenue per install and 20% increase in revenue per session.

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