Case Study: Supporting Online Retail

How we achieved 96.3% of our sales forecast for the Gin Warehouse in lockdown

The Gin Warehouse is a start-up specialty online spirits retailer set up in 2020. Part of their launch strategy relied on a physical pop-up store at Bluewater Shopping Centre in Kent. The pop-up store had just opened when the UK government announced a second national lockdown starting on 5th November 2020.

The Gin Warehouse now had to be closed for another 4 weeks. And it came at an inconvenient time: Christmas. The shop had gone from 110,000 daily footfall to zero at this crucial period. Doing nothing was going to cost the retailer £9,000 in lost revenue over the period. On top of that, the Gin Warehouse’s marketing had already been agreed and produced.

And that was focused on traditional offline communications and online marketing targeting local customers. We’d actually invested ourselves: £500 toward window display and £150 toward targeted geolocated social media advertising.

Task

The Gin Warehouse were relying on this pop-up store for sales in the Christmas period. They now needed to shift their sales online, so we needed to revisit our marketing to support them and maximise sales for our brands. The objectives were to:

Generate enough volume to justify our initial in-store investment
Drive traffic to the Gin Warehouse’s website
Capture Christmas gifting purchases online
Achieve 50% in-store to online conversion for the 252 forecasted units sales in-store
Balance supply to the Gin Warehouse and to our other customers

Action

The first thing we did was to review our spirits marketing campaigns and update them to the Gin Warehouse’s new environment. We removed the targeted social media advertising based on location (within 25 miles of Bluewater). Instead we ran a national social media advertising campaign for the same £150. As part of that, we switched our targeting to an audience who were:

interested in the following topics: cocktail, gift basket, drinking, alcohol, entertainment, drinking entertainment, gin, gin and tonic, giveaways or discounting
aged between 25 and 50
based in the whole of UK

We crafted the campaign around sponsored posts for each of our brands that was available through the Gin Warehouse.

We then agreed an activation package with the Gin Warehouse and our listed brands on the website:

We put some of our most popular SKUs on promotion with a 10% discount. This was to drive traffic to the website
We agreed a digital media package for our brands on the website. This included special homepage banners to advertise our promotions. Our objective was to make our brands standout from the 100+ SKU’s in their catalogue.
We agreed a range of ‘Buy & Get’ promotions. The objective was to upsell and generate more volume on some of our brands that were new to the market

Result

Here’s what we achieved in the 28 days of national lockdown for the Gin Warehouse by adapting our approach:

%

Increase online sales for our brands from 30 units per month

units sold in 28 days. A 55% conversion from the in store forecast

%

OF OUR 11-WEEK SALES FORECAST FOR OUR BRANDS. (OUR SALES FORECAST DID NOT INCLUDE A LOCKDOWN.)

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