Positive Perspectives for Luxury Brands Embracing a Successful Ecommerce and Digital Strategy in a COVID-19 era

Facebook has just launched a series of webinars called “Luxury Perspective Webinars”, providing good insights and tips for luxury professionals and brands. In this shaky COVID-19 era, the data and recommendations from the Social Network were highly expected. The webinar mostly focused on the “paid social” part of social media.

Morin Oluwole, Global Head of Luxury, Facebook & Instagram, Jean-Marc Bellaiche, CSO ContentSquare, and Violaine Gressier, Global Industry Manager, Luxury & Beauty for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger & WhatsApp, led the first episode of these webinars named “How Luxury Brands Can Embrace a Successful Ecommerce Strategy”.

1- Unprecedented — and unleashed — digital behaviors, opening the Pandora box for e-commerce growth

Jean-Marc Bellaiche reminded us that there is a saying which goes like: “it takes 21 days to form a habit”. And this is precisely what Facebook and ContentSquare observed between pre-COVID-19 and now. Obviously, 70% of global consumers say they’re spending more time on their smartphone, Facebook noticed a 50% increase in Facebook Live viewers and 70% of global users took part in group conversation.

But more importantly, people who were reluctant to buy online were sort of “forced” to purchase goods through e-commerce platforms. This trial, which was either postponed or avoided, did happen. The positive experience of buying online is here to stay, and it is very unlikely to revert to old patterns.

Source: Facebook

2- All performance indicators to luxury websites on the rise

If traffic to luxury websites is about to reach the pre-COVID-19 period, the transactions are simply booming.

Source: ContentSquare

Transactions are up 40% above pre-crisis levels, but some countries skyrocket. In the US, we are talking about a 75% increase.

Source: ContentSquare

France and the Middle East are still recovering a bit more slowly but still; with such a special crisis, the fact that the luxury industry is already experiencing these levels of business could not be forecast this way.

Traffic to luxury websites is generally powered by users who have a potential intent to buy anyway, so the COVID-19 did not really change the conversation rate.

3- Hard luxury is the big winner, as well as the luxury beauty

Luxury can be a bit vague to analyze as a whole.

Source: ContentSquare

Diving into more specific definitions, it is clear that hard luxury showed a better volume of e-commerce transactions: +150% above pre-COVID-19 levels, +30% “only” for soft luxury. An opposite trend if we compare it with the previous crisis.

Source: ContentSquare

Some explanations can be envisioned:

1- the segments that hard luxury targets are less impacted by COVID-19: they are more affluent, money is ready to be spent

2- hard luxury might be perceived as more long-lasting goods, true investments thanks to the nature of the products, and stronger brand equities. The gifts that are given during COVID-19 period can follow this need and wish

3- luxury cosmetics pivoted extremely fast towards hand-care, self-care, providing consumable products that are true self-treats at home

4- the brands might have a stronger CRM and a special, highly personal relationship with the customers

5- Following this trend, mono-brand websites did overperform multi-brands platforms. Proving the fact that luxury multi-brands platforms need to enrich the content, the uniqueness of the experience, that a mono-brand platform has to crack per se.

6- Some brands knew how to stimulate online demands, focusing on untapped pools of customers, who were maybe up until now less stimulated online

4- A magic digital marketing mix for luxury brands

The webinar focused on various tips & tricks for luxury brands.

1- Personalization can be achieved; let’s apply common sense

It is now feasible to deliver relevant product ads to the right people, wherever (and whenever) they are in the journey thanks to machine learning and automation.

Source: Facebook

There is a need to kill silos within organizations so the storytelling part can strongly feed the path to purchase.

2- Creative and marketing: the era of creativity marketing and creative strategy

Once the “Foundations” are built, the main idea is to capture intent across all surfaces. In other words, make sure to deliver the right message to the right micro-moment of truth, and focus not only on acquiring any new customers but the potentially most valuable, loyal ones. To achieve that, creative and marketing people need to merge their outputs.

Dior, for instance, focused on desirability…but also performance. Image and social media best practice worked hand-in-hand, delivering not only clicks but also feeding the targeted individuals with the right narrative.

Facebook experts focused on the fact that talking about “visually compelling formats” also means developing the perfect copywriting for the ads. A practice often under-rated, which is, however, crucial to creating meaningful ads.