How Levi's connected customer data across channels and increased its marketing effectiveness

Founded in 1853, today Levi’s is one of the largest apparel brands and a global leader in jeanswear. Levi's strategic ambition is to be the world’s best apparel company through superior product quality, sustainability, and a culture of innovation.

For the marketing team, this means that they needed to find a partner and a solution that would help bring maximum value across all channels and customer touchpoints, online and offline.

To realize this ambition, in 2021 Levi’s marketing team turned to their trusted partner, OMD, to find the right solution. The choice fell on the Relay42 Platform - today part of Supermetrics.

The challenge: Making data fit: connecting data across channels

Just as in Gold Rush days, a few weeks' delay meant the difference between striking it rich and going broke with just the jeans on your backside, Levi’s and the Relay42/OMD team had just a short time to get things rolling. And the clock was ticking.

Despite the promise of Big Data, relatively few companies maximize the use of the data already within their systems – much less connect it to other sources, such as offline sales. Knowing where the data is and how to get access to it is one of the biggest problems in all of data science.

8 weeks onboarding
Together with OMD and Levi’s marketing team, Relay42’s Customer Success team led an accelerated SPRINT framework and onboarded the markets of the UK, Germany, and France in just 8 weeks , connecting: the website, CRM, in-store data, search, programmatic, and social (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube).

Relay42’s platform was clearly capable of connecting all relevant data and bringing it together in one place — and both the marketer and agency were impressed by their stance as market-savvy data experts. A package quickly came together.

The platform would enable consistent data collection across digital properties, such as brand and retail sites, initially in the UK, Germany, and France. It would also be able to unify datasets across other digital entities (the web, email, CRM, and mobile) and export meaningful audience segmentations to the wider adtech and martech ecosystem, so Levi’s marketers could make use of it. This would also attribute sales to the correct source, automate many campaigns within CRM, and make results easily communicable in visual reports and charts.

The team’s plan checked all these boxes, with a comprehensive set of use cases spanning many customer journeys and uniting the data from each at multiple touchpoints. Use cases included a customer searching the web for retailers, people browsing Levi’s own site, and social media users, including Facebook. It also went offline: every time an email address is collected at checkout, it is added to the CDP for matching and entity resolution.

These use cases were then implemented for Levi’s marketing team, working on a range of success metrics. If a customer is buying a pair of blue jeans, it’s common for them to want T-shirts and socks too, so appropriate ad creative was developed for each case. (Ayers divides the journey on the Levi’s website into four stages: using the site, showing interest in products, adding a product to their basket, and completing the purchase.)

The team also paid attention to some less common use cases, like when not to show an ad to a customer. Because if a customer’s at the wrong stage of his/her journey (known as “propensity to buy”), too much advertising is just an annoyance. Sometimes it’s best to suppress outreach at a given touchpoint and let the customer draw breath.

Thanks to a great working relationship, the SPRINT framework – and, presumably, a great deal of coffee – OMD, Levi’s, and Relay42 completed the implementation in less than three months, in time for Levi’s next campaigning season.

Riveting results: connected data strikes it rich

Despite having been in place for barely half a year since their initial brief, the team is already seeing positive results in the data. With 6.6 million records imported into the Relay42 platform, the first three markets now have a single view of the customer , informing programmatic campaigns across search and shopping channels, as well as offline data keyed by email address, and tailored ads across social media, including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

When compared to Conversion Rate averages, uplift was particularly strong – up 115% in online sales from brand search (i.e., people who searched the web and then went on to make a purchase). 20% of all conversions now come from the platform. This has also prompted Levi’s to improve its strategy for CPC advertising (such as Google) to extract maximum value from various audience segments.

On Social media use cases (Facebook & Instagram), the UK was a standout. Across all campaign audiences combined, the Relay42 platform delivered a  377% increase in CVR  and a 45% increase in ROI . France and Germany followed, with CVRs of 249% and 154% respectively.

On Programmatic use cases, Relay42 audiences showed encouraging results in lookalike audiences with up to 326% CPM decrease in Germany, and a 65% CPC decrease in the United Kingdom.

What’s interesting is how little focus the team has on traditional demographic factors, such as age and income. To Levi’s, its customer segment is psychographics, not M/F and ABC1s. Which Levi Strauss would have understood. Anyone can be a customer of great quality denim

Expanding west: what’s next for Levi’s?

Like a pair of 501s, the program shows no signs of wearing out. With Levi’s own sites and broader site search in the bag, eyes are now turning to affiliates: retailers selling the company’s products outside the 2,800 physical Levi’s stores. Because their data can be useful, too.

They’re looking to add more social channels to cover a wider range of customer groups, such as Amazon and TikTok – connectors already available in the Relay42 platform. From the UK, Germany, and France already in their (watch) pocket, six new Europeans are joining the fray: Italy, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

But the most far-reaching ambitions go even further. The Levi’s/OMD collaboration is the first for Relay42’s new AI module. On the platform, machine learning intelligence will predict which products will resonate most strongly with given audience groups, defining new segments and behavior in the process.

This answers a plus-sized goal: to be the world’s greatest expert on customer behavior over the next decade. An ambition of which a certain fabric importer in 1853 would've been very proud.