Merkle Sokrati & dentsu boost Emami Zandu Care’s conversion rates by 21%

The global pandemic has brought the need for brands to adapt themselves digitally and transform their presence online to stay competitive. This has led brands, especially in the CPG category, to shift their focus towards e-commerce and D2C. The resulting digital acceleration has made it crucial for brands to maximise online channels by making sense of various data points in a privacy-safe environment. However, identifying and reaching the right audiences that enhance campaign performance, can be a challenging feat. This predicament prompts traditional brands to opt for intelligence-based products and platforms to augment their marketing efforts.

Emami Zandu Care, a CPG (consumer packaged goods) brand, has steadily been increasing its digital presence in an effort to boost conversions through its e-commerce site. Facebook has been an important part of the brand’s strategy in trying to maximise digital channels. Yet, improving performance over a period of time can be difficult. Merkle Sokrati, a data-driven, and technology-enabled performance marketing agency, has consistently emphasized the need for data-driven marketing solutions. The agency invests in advanced solutions for audience platforms, identity solutions, and innovative measurement to drive future growth in performance media.

As Emami Zandu Care’s strategic partner, Merkle Sokrati, to further improve the performance of the brand’s Facebook ads, collaborated with dentsu Data Sciences APAC. The agency leveraged DMC, a proprietary product suite from dentsu Data Sciences, to drive improvements in campaign RoAS (Return on Ad Spend).

Merkle Sokrati deployed the DMC product suite for this campaign to get better audience targeting suggestions which helped them extract maximum value from engaged users in order to find the next most valuable customers. DMC optimisation models evaluate parameters like engagement, CPAs, audience saturation, spending capacity, etc. while prioritising recency to generate accurate predictions of an ad set's performance. This machine learning-powered optimisation approach yielded higher conversions for the brand. The personalised messaging and captivating creatives made by the agency provided an additional boost to the overall engagement & impact of the marketing campaigns.

The dentsu Data Sciences division builds products that help brands solve for marketing effectiveness through data-led intelligence. Dentsu Marketing Cloud (DMC) is one such offering that drives incremental value across all stages of the campaign, from insights to activation. Its sophisticated machine-learning algorithms help marketers cull rich audience insights, holistically across walled gardens, and auto recommends the most valuable audience segments to target along with advanced optimization suggestions based on the campaign objective. This enables brands to maximise their campaign outcomes beyond what is available through native platform features.

Commenting on the campaign, Anubhav Sonthalia, CEO, Merkle Sokrati & dentsu CXM India, said, “People don’t have shorter attention spans, instead they have shorter consideration spans. With Zandu, it was crucial for us to identify (1) hyper-relevant users who would consider the product & move to the purchase stage and (2) best-performing ad sets that would result in higher conversions and RoAS. With DMC’s Optimisation and Learnings, we were able to deploy remarketing campaigns for recently engaged users & improve Zandu's purchases by 16% & CVRs by 21%.”

Sunil Naryani, Chief Product Officer, Media, APAC, dentsu, added here, “By coupling data science & improved AI/ML sophistication with product development we are able to continually enhance our product offerings to unlock incremental value for our clients. The recent Zandu campaign is one such strong example, and what sets it apart is that our proprietary product DMC delivered tangible business value for the brand in terms of incremental conversions and purchases.”

Merkle Sokrati’s approach to leveraging dentsu Data Sciences’ product suite increased Emami Zandu Care’s conversion rates during its month-long campaign by 21%. With a further increase of 16% in purchases and over 20% improvement in RoAS, the campaign was a resounding success. Post these results, Emami Zandu Care has taken another step toward data-driven marketing maturity as the brand has now adopted data-led efficiencies as part of its ‘always-on’ strategies.

Shelley Sam, Director Product Solutions, dentsu, commented, “By integrating into Walled Garden ecosystems and deploying sophisticated machine learning algorithms across their data, DMC helps marketers deliver better ROI. For Emami, DMC was able to identify high valued audiences and optimise efficiency at scale by seamlessly changing budget & bid strategies based on near real-time statistics. This helped the brand achieve new industry-leading benchmarks in performance.”