Meet a Landy Award winner: For its work with Lane Bryant, Razorfish wins Best Mobile SEM & Best Retail SEM Initiatives

From left, Merete Kenworthy, Kristy Croft and Courtney Demko from Razorfish accept the Search Engine Land Award for Best Retail SEM Initiative. The team also took home the prize for Best Mobile SEM Initiative.

Razorfish took home the Landy Award for both Best Retail SEM Initiative and Best Mobile SEM Initiative this year for its work with retailer Lane Bryant.

Last year, the Razorfish team noticed mobile searches had started surpassing desktop for the first time among Lane Bryant’s current and prospective customers.

At the time, the women’s clothing retailer’s online momentum relied heavily on high-converting desktop traffic, and the dramatic shift in device behavior threatened to upend that success. Razorfish set out to understand how mobile was impacting offline sales and developed a plan that would take advantage of shifting behaviors and give Lane Bryant customers a seamless experience across all channels — all in time for the holidays.

Razorfish created consistent brand messages that addressed specific customer needs and distributed the ads across multiple channels with search, display and video ad formats to reach target audiences wherever they were. The agency also developed concise mobile-specific ad copy and jumped in on an AdWords beta that helped garner brand attention and improve click-through rates.

On the measurement end, Razorfish established a second set of KPIs to capture actions such as mobile store locator usage and email signups to identify and optimize campaigns that were driving store traffic and growing the CRM database. Participating in Google’s Store Visits measurement beta allowed Razorfish to attribute offline store visits to AdWords campaigns and optimize the campaigns using that data.

The original goal was to maintain revenue and ROAS comps from the previous year through the holiday season. However, the integrated, mobile-focused program ended up generating a significant lift in ROAS, and mobile revenue increased substantially over the previous year.

“At Razorfish, our team focuses on evolving campaigns in order to drive business impact,” said Courtney Demko, associate director of media at Razorfish. “With consumer behavior shifts impacting YoY program performance it was important to understand those behaviors and how consumers were interacting differently with the brand. Through our campaign evolution we deployed a series of unique ads and enhanced customer’s journey all while measuring actions which drove business impact.”

“This integrated campaign took the retailer from a ‘search campaign’ to an immersive experience across channels,” said Search Engine Land Awards judge Sarah Engel, SVP of global marketing at DynamicAction. “The agency pushed the envelope with beta tests and new tactics aimed at finding new, more targeted, and better ways to reach and convert the shopper.”