ICONIC London Sees 152% Boost With The Wunderkind Identity Network

Kathleen Loftus: Hi. I'm Kathleen Loftus, the Global Digital Director at ICONIC London. If you don't know ICONIC London, you should. It is all about the glow. So we provide products to make women feel better about themselves, really have a glowy or fun, trendy makeup look. We're all about skin finishes, so if you want to look good behind a Zoom camera for a meeting, we provide that. If you want to go all out glam, we also have products for you. So I work for a very TikTok and influencer marketing Instagram heavy social media brand. So we have influencers driving to our website all the time, and this is a great problem to have. But with Wunderkind, we started working with them because we're now able to identify who these people are who are coming to our website. ICONIC London was born on social media, so a lot of people would find us from a big influencer. They follow celebrity makeup artists use us. So if you follow award shows or anything big going on, probably people are using the highlighter or the shimmer spray. So ICONIC is really fun. We're well known. We're a niche brand, but all about a glow. So influencers love our products. We've gone viral on TikTok and on Instagram, and people who want to be better at makeup, they come to our brand for unique tutorials, tips and tricks. Every time we launch a product, we launch it with a technique. It's not 100% direct to consumer, but as a digitally native brand, that's really important to us. So we've expanded into look fantastic in the UK, Sephora, Ulta, the big guys, if you will, but also we remain D2C forward. So everything we do, we want to have what people see on Instagram, TikTok, also on our website. So for us, and maybe selfishly for me being the digital director, D2C is at the front of everything. For ICONIC. We're working with Wunderkind on email capture and then triggered emails. ICONIC London really grew during COVID, and our unique selling point was we're everywhere on social media. So people were coming to our site, lots of influencers posting about us, but with COVID, we lost that USP because everybody had to pivot and start being a direct to consumer, social media focused brand. So for us, we want to have quality customers on our site and be able to identify them. So we broke it down. We went back to marketing one- on- one where email became a huge focus for us. So we now are able with Wunderkind to identify who's on our site, see that they're high quality traffic, and then market them in the behavioral ways that they want to be marketed. So if they come to our website from a certain activation that we have, we can tailor this and make sure that they're receiving information when they want it, and because they were browsing our website in a certain way. We started with Wunderkind just in the UK because that's our biggest market. We are a London- based brand. So we thought, let's give it a whirl here and see what happens first. So we have triggered email and email capture forms on the website, and we overexceeded our revenue goal by 105%. So we decided this might be worth it in the US as well. So we love Wunderkind because with Wunderkind, our submit rates have gone from a 2.4% to a 9.9%, and our conversion is up to a 7.4%. We also overachieved our revenue goal in the UK by 105% and our revenue goal in the US by 152%. So ICONIC is a private equity backed company. Profitability for us is king. And with Wunderkind something that we look at, not only our submit rates conversion rate, how many people are coming from which segment of the emails, but we look at lifetime value because it's great if we're getting new customers on the site to submit and then we can retarget them. But how do we keep them in the fold with Wunderkind messaging? In addition, we also look at return on ad spend. So whether we're looking at last click revenue or attributed revenue, our last click revenue with Wunderkind is a 6. 6 X. So every customer is valuable to us and we use different methods to target them. As a thought leader, I think it's crucial to know who you're talking to. You wouldn't have the same conversation with your grandma versus somebody who is driving you in an Uber. So you have to have the thought behind your marketing and your messaging. There's no one size fits all anymore. I wish it would be much easier for all of our jobs, but we just can't do that. So for us, our strategies are different in the UK and the US. We're very well known in the UK and we've just made it to the US. So having a customer that we can identify differently and treat them differently helps us not leave money on the table. When we capture emails, that to us is like gold because we can speak one- to- one to them. You can't speak directly to a customer through other channels such as paid media or a TikTok video. So for us to be able to know that someone's interested and then speak directly to us is crucial. When we look at then retargeting, you know that someone has showed interest in various places on your website. So we have segments and levers for these customers to pull when we need. My advice to someone going into 2024 would be to be able to identify their customers without knowing the IP address, and that is key for Wunderkind. Wunderkind is the only company I'm aware of that actually identifies by device and not IP. So for us, when we have all this traffic, we are able to know who's crucial to us to remarket, but also there's always going to be something, whether it's a war or politics, there's something getting more attention than your brand. So being able to move from paid media to email marketing where it's probably more profitable anyway is key in a time of everything's more expensive, costs are increasing, products are delayed in shipment because of the Suez Canal. There's a lot of things happening that with being able to identify, you can really move things and just get to your customer when and how you need. Personalization is very important. Even if you have somebody's name in a subject line, your open rate will increase tenfold. So personalization for us is something that we're able to do with Wunderkind, and we're looking to implement a lot more strategies in 2024 because people want to deal with brands and people that they feel speak directly to them. You're not interested in brands that are not interested in you. Before we implemented with Wunderkind, we were leaving a lot of money on the table. Customers were coming to us from various sources, but unless they were logged into their Shopify account, we weren't able to know who was there to even speak to them. So now with Wunderkind, it's no longer 1 in 20 people are logged in. We can identify 7 in 20. So we're able to know who's coming to the site and then be proactive with marketing to them. So now that we're able to identify these customers, we can send them welcome flows, reminders. For us, it's really fun because we're a cheeky brand. Hey babes, you forgot something in your basket or you're flirting with us, you want to come back for more? So we're able to message them in a fun way and identify, do they need a little nudge here or there? When they open this email, they feel important. They feel like we already know where they left off and they just needed a little reminder. They had to run out to a dinner, and after the dinner, they come back and here we are for them to shop. Before that, we didn't know who was on the site, so we didn't have the capability to send that email. Wunderkind is a white glove service, and as an internal team, whether you're big or you're small, I don't think we have the capacity to identify 9 billion devices. Whether they like it or not, we speak to our Wunderkind ASMs almost every day. They're an extension of our team. If we need something, we collaborate on it. It's good for us because we can share our goals and our KPIs, but also look to Wunderkind for their best practices. So together we work in tandem to make sure that our efforts are effective. Wunderkind removes a barrier for us because they're able to implement things without us. We set something up strategically as a team so that we can work on things that require our team's knowledge and input and expertise while we leave the hard stuff and the tech coding to Wunderkind. I think every thought leader would like to and should investigate other methods of doing this. Of course, we can build a hundred flows and create multiple different ways to target a customer. However, if we're not able to identify them by device, we simply can't do this on our own right now. AI is here to stay. I think the big thing is we just need to keep AI in check. It has loads of capabilities, but it needs the human touch. So I think AI is anything from generative AI to predictive AI. For us, we can use these efficiencies to personalize our content so we can segment things differently based on AI. I think the big thing for us is just to realize only 50% of consumers trust AI. So it's making sure that they understand and they build trust together. Another one for us, I would say, virtual try- on used to be something that only some brands did. And virtual try- on now, if you don't have it, you don't sell your products. So having things in the beauty industry, like a fragrance finder, a makeup finder, a shade finder, these are all crucial to trusting these analytics tools. Being able to identify a user's want and needs, and then curate them to fit into your marketing. We can learn a lot from Black Friday, and Black Friday is going to happen every year. Thanksgiving happens every year. I think what we need to consider for years moving forward is what's crucial to your brand, because we can't have the biggest day of sales ever each year. I think when you're looking at forecasts, when you're looking at your day- on- day sales, look at it more holistically. Is this customer that you're getting during Black Friday also shopping with you in January and March or whatever your lifetime value looks like? How are you treating them differently as well? Why did they pull the trigger on your site during that timeframe? For us, Black Friday is huge. For any makeup brand, I think Black Friday you do see these huge spikes, but potentially look to see how you create more urgency and how you can give different customers different offers based on the level of engagement they have with you. So how do you look at loyal customers different than someone who's buying one time from your brand? We've had amazing success with Wunderkind and we love the team. We're looking forward to 2024 growing even more than 2023, which I know sounds outrageous with the marketplace right now, but we can't wait. We already have strategies in place and we're hitting the ground running this year.