Wiping Out Inefficiency: Essity Optimizes Return on Ad Spend with BlueConic

About Essity

Essity is a global market leader in the hygiene and health sector dedicated to breaking barriers to well-being through its products and services. Its diverse portfolio of trusted brands includes TENA, Tork, Colhogar, Actimove, Bodyform, JOBST, Knix, Leukoplast, Libero, Libresse, Lotus, Modibodi, Nosotras, Saba, Tempo, TOM Organic, Vinda, and Zewa.

Challenges

Like many companies, Essity's Consumer Goods Americas Unit was facing a tough challenge: adapting their advertising strategy to evolving consumer data privacy laws and third-party cookie loss. These shifts were undermining the company’s remarketing efforts, making it difficult to effectively target and engage customers across channels and touchpoints.

To ensure the continued effectiveness of their remarketing efforts, Essity recognized the need to shift from third-party data to privacy compliant first-party data. Despite having a wealth of first-party data, it was siloed across disparate systems and sources with no easy way to tie it together. This fragmentation made it difficult for their regional marketing teams to gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers and effectively tailor their efforts to improve media efficiency and maximize the impact of their advertising budget.

Solutions

To address these challenges, Essity's Consumer Goods Americas Unit partnered with BlueConic to unlock greater returns from their customer data. Using BlueConic’s customer data platform, the company consolidated their disparate data sources into unified profiles that capture each individual customer’s purchase history, category interest, product sampling details, website behaviors, engagement activities, consent preferences, and more.

Using BlueConic’s built-in segmentation and activation capabilities, Essity leveraged this profile data to build highly targeted audience segments based on key attributes and send those segments directly to their advertising platforms via out-of-the-box connections. For example, the company used transactional data stored in the profiles to create rich, multi-dimensional customer segments based on the categories and products they had previously purchased. These segments are then instantly activated for remarketing campaigns on platforms like Meta and Instagram.

BlueConic’s seamless integration with these platforms enabled Essity to send personalized messages tailored to these specific segments, increasing the relevance and effectiveness of their ads. And since segments update in real time as individuals’ attributes change, Essity was not only able to reach the right people with the right message based on their most recent interests and behaviors, but also suppress ads from those unlikely to convert — all of which led to more conversions at a lower cost per acquisition (CPA) and a better return on ad spend (ROAS).

Results

Using BlueConic to build comprehensive customer profiles, create targeted segments, and push those segments to the appropriate channels has yielded impressive results. In just two months, Essity's Consumer Goods Americas Unit saw a 50% reduction in CPA, a 42% increase in revenue in its online shop, and a 25% increase in ROAS using BlueConic segments compared to traditional Meta audiences – despite reducing their retargeting budget by 20%.

By overcoming critical data challenges and enhancing targeting precision, Essity not only improved their current advertising performance but also paved the way for future growth and innovation. Looking ahead, the company plans to explore new use cases for BlueConic segments in the upper and middle parts of the marketing funnel to boost awareness and build initial interest among prospective buyers. Additionally, they intend to develop segments for promoting product upgrades, encouraging customers to transition to higher-tier products.