The Industry
ABOUT VIRGIN MEDIA O2
Virgin Media O2 is a British mass media and telecommunications company based in London, England. The company was formed in June 2021 as a 50:50 joint venture between Liberty Global and Telefónica through the merger of their respective Virgin Media, the UK’s fastest major broadband provider, and O2, the UK’s favourite mobile network operator.
Two of the UK’s most iconic brands, combining 46 million+ broadband, mobile, phone and home subscribers, 18,700 employees and £650 Million a year spent in advertising, came together to give the UK more choice and better value throughout the country.
The Challenge
IRRELEVANT CUSTOMER TARGETING IN DIGITAL AD CAMPAIGNS LED TO BUDGET WASTAGE THAT IMPACTED BUSINESS OUTCOMES
An effective paid acquisition strategy involves taking steps to minimise the wastage that comes with inaccurate customer targeting, helping companies identify and engage with new prospects who are more likely to convert. A better targeting strategy will impact not only on Conversion and Acquisition Costs, but also on ROI, allowing the saved money to be reinvested.
With the objective of reducing cost per order (CPO) while increasing conversion rate and customer acquisition efficiency on its digital advertising campaigns, Virgin Media O2, aimed to improve its paid acquisition strategy by:
- suppressing irrelevant customers (existing customers, who have already purchased, or cannot purchase) from its campaigns;
- acquiring new customers;
- upselling or cross-selling to the existing ones.
The Solution
SUPPRESSING EXISTING CUSTOMERS FROM PAID MEDIA TO REACH AN AUDIENCE MORE LIKELY TO CONVERT
Virgin Media O2 worked closely with Zeotap to identify the right audiences to target, by suppressing the existing customers from its media campaigns.
The process followed 3 main steps:
- Zeotap CDP unified first-party customer data from 3 key Company data silos: Web, Mobile, Cable.
- Zeotap CDP stitched together the available data to identify unique customers’ profiles on activation platforms
- Zeotap CDP created audience segments to be suppressed from the designated activation channels in order to exclude existing customers from digital advertising campaigns on Google Search and Facebook; and from retargeting campaigns on Facebook and Instagram
Using Zeotap’s CDP’s impactful suppression capabilities to spend smarter on its acquisition campaigns, Virgin O2 reduced cost per order (CPO), while freeing up budget for other prospecting campaigns.
Watch to learn more about the Virgin Media O2 suppression use case implementation and execution:
THE RESULTS
£1 MILLION SAVED ON PAID ACQUISITION CAMPAIGNS, WITH A BETTER CONVERSION RATE
Thanks to Zeotap CDP, Virgin Media O2 saved £1 million direct budget on paid media in one year, while bringing more new customers in return. It was able to suppress 70% of existing customers from its digital campaign and decreasing the cost per order by 37%, while increasing the conversion rate with re-invested budget up to 43%.
THE FUTURE
5 YEARS PLAN FOR BETTER BUSINESS OUTCOME
In an already cookieless panorama, where the DMP’s had failed and with a £650 Million budget spent in advertising, Virgin Media has a clear vision for its future with Zeotap, which involves working on:
- Real time data ingestion
- Data enrichment
- AI & ML propensity models
- Real-time website personalization
- Custom consent expiry
- Multivariate household ID stitching
