Chalhoub Group increases ad revenue by 40% and lowers CAC by 30% for one of their online stores

Results

• Customer acquisition costs lowered by 30%
• Increased return on ad spends (ROAS) and click-through rates (CTRs)
• Hightouch powers 40% of all revenue generated through Meta
• Hightouch powers 45% of all revenue generated through Snapchat
• Higher match rates on ad platforms
• No more data uploads
• Enhanced security and data privacy

About Chalhoub Group - Inspire, Exhilarate, Delight

Chalhoub Group embraces an innovation mindset, coupled with a desire to constantly redefine luxury in the region. Chalhoub Group caters to its customers across multiple channels, including 680 experiential retail stores, online and through mobile apps. Headquartered in Dubai, the Group has a strong workforce of more than 14,000 skilled, talented, and passionate people in 7 countries. As a people-centric and responsible employer, Chalhoub Group is ranked third in the Middle East and second in Saudi Arabia as a Great Place to Work®.

Alongside business and people priorities, Chalhoub Group is also a sustainability champion. The Group is a member of the United Nations Global Compact Community and signatory of the Women's Empowerment Principles. Chalhoub Group was awarded its seventh CSR Label from the Dubai Chamber of Commerce & Industry and has its own incubator space for innovation and entrepreneurship, “The Greenhouse.”

The Challenge: Building Personalized Experiences

The rapid changes of 2020 highlighted the importance of customer data to all stakeholders within Chalhoub Group. Understanding customer behavior and consumer preferences is vital to every business team in Chalhoub Group across customer experience, marketing, sales, e-commerce, and more.

With a portfolio of over 300 brands and over 5.1 million unique customer records, Chalhoub Group collects a significant amount of behavioral and historical transaction data across its digital touchpoints. All of this data is stored, transformed, and modeled in Google BigQuery. However, activating this customer data in downstream marketing channels was nearly impossible. Sending customer data to various ad platforms meant manually downloading segmentation lists out of a CRM and uploading them directly – creating a tedious and time-consuming exercise.

We used to have to go to our CRM and spend hours building customer segments, and manually upload them to our marketing platforms, but this data wasn’t refreshed, clean, or debugged in any way. We could only do this once a year because we couldn’t afford to take two weeks off to upload static files.

Tomasz Mazur

Head of Customer Acquisition

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Chalhoub

Chalhoub Group was also running some marketing campaigns using third-party data and cookies, but with the recent changes to consumer privacy, this had become less efficient as third-party data was becoming less accurate. The Group needed a way to reduce not only ad spend, but also a way to ensure all ads were being surfaced to the right people at the right time to continue enhancing the customer experience.

The Group’s transformation mindset and vision: “A hybrid retailer bringing luxury experiences to the fingertips of customers everywhere” led the Group in search of a solution that would help activate all the unique customer data living in Google BigQuery and sync it to the desired destinations. Hightouch contributes to Chalhoub Group’s enhancement of its technological capabilities to become a fully hybrid retailer.

The Solution: Improved Audience Capabilities and Ad Targeting

With Hightouch's native integrations, Chalhoub Group can build custom audience segments in BigQuery unique to specific brands, customers, and products. Once Chalhoub Group defines these audiences in BigQuery, they are synced directly to Facebook, Google, Tiktok, and Snapchat for more targeted advertising.

Enhancing the hybrid experience

Chalhoub Group constantly aims to offer their consumers a hybrid experience, keeping innovation at the forefront. Capturing accurate information and providing a customer experience that is consistent between online and offline is essential. With the technology provided by Hightouch, Chalhoub Group has seen a substantial increase in return on ad spend (ROAS) and clickthrough rates (CTRs) as it leverages all existing customer data to inform decisions and iterate with audiences in real time.

Identifying Lookalike Audiences

Identifying new audiences and prospecting for new users is vital to Chalhoub Group’s mission of building relationships and connections with new customers. With Hightouch, the Group can segment customers by their shopping cart items and sync that information to various ad platforms to identify lookalike audiences and target specific demographic locations – leading to a higher match rate and a reduction in customer acquisition cost (CAC) by 30%.

Smart Targeting Based on Purchase History

Using Hightouch, Chalhoub Group can target recent buyers based on their transaction history and offer products and services that are unique to their interests. With Hightouch, the Group can make predictions about customer behavior and buying habits and create relevant experiences based on the average order value (AOV). Currently, Hightouch is powering 40% of all revenue generated through Meta and 46% of all revenue generated through Snapchat.

Enhanced Security and Data Privacy

Security is at the forefront of everything that Chalhoub Group does, and all data is automatically filtered before Hightouch ever touches it. Google BigQuery data is automatically divided into different serving layers, with stringent role and permission grants in place to block any unwanted access.

What’s Next?

A finding in the GCC Personal Luxury In 2021: A Story of Early Recovery & Growth” report that was launched in collaboration with the Fashion Commission of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Culture, saw that consumers in the region are more comfortable with e-commerce as 65% are buying online more than pre-covid.

Now that the consumers in the Middle East are more and more accustomed to shopping online, there is no doubt that this channel will remain an integral part of the GCC landscape moving forward and will continue to grow. Chalhoub Group is continuously transforming and accelerating its tech capabilities to deliver on its purpose to inspire, exhilarate, and delight employees, customers, and partners across all the markets where they operate.

With the aim to be a fully hybrid retailer, Chalhoub Group continues to invest in technology and data to continue enhancing the customer experience and drive e-commerce forward. A most recent investment by the Group includes building a propensity score model in Google BigQuery to make predictions about various customers related to their interests and purchasing patterns.