illy caffè: Brewing Success with Amazon
The Challenge
With two massive legacy brands holding more than 50% of the market share, the coffee market is a notoriously tough grind.
Sustainable coffee brand illy caffè hoped to take on its competitors by stealing market share and growing new-to-brand customers. Founded in 1930, the Italian coffee brand hoped to win over customers highlighting its highly regarded quality and its environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable practices.
However, with its two largest competitors each holding more than three times illy’s market share (and customers not easily swayed from their preferred brand), this was not going to be easy.
illy hoped to attract new-to-brand customers, encouraging purchases and fostering brand loyalty from the onset. The brand asked Tinuiti, its performance marketing firm, to create an energizing strategy to achieve this goal.
Results
+99%
Increase in YoY new Amazon sales
+18%
Sales performance exceeding target
+50%
Increase in YoY glance views
How We Did It
Tinuiti created a campaign to reach consumers at their first touchpoint when shopping for coffee, targeting new customers who had no prior engagements with illy products.
Tinuiti began by digging into how and when people purchase coffee, finding that customers typically buy a fresh batch of coffee within three months of their previous purchase. This provided Tinuiti an effective messaging cadence to reach coffee drinkers.
Research also showed that multiple touchpoints are necessary to convert new customers on small-ticket, low-research products like coffee – especially when convincing someone to switch brands.
Given its reach, targeting capabilities, and the variety of tactics it enabled, Amazon was selected as the ideal platform. With the introduction of streaming ads, Amazon Prime had recently emerged as a new inventory source, and illy wanted to move quickly on this opportunity to engage high-value customers through previously untapped channels.
Tinuiti ran video ads highlighting illy’s quality and sustainability on both Amazon streaming TV (Prime) and its webpages. To extend reach, Tinuiti also served display ads online, using broad audience targeting and retargeting techniques to advertise illy products even when customers weren’t shopping for coffee.
Tinuiti strategically shifted illy’s historic spend from lower-funnel tactics (such as product loyalty campaigns, which had reached their saturation point in attracting new customers) into upper-funnel awareness activities, like non-branded searches, streaming TV, and online video. The goal was to fill the top of the funnel, strategically guiding customers through consideration to purchase.
Given illy’s premium quality, Tinuiti implemented demographic targeting into its streaming TV campaign to reach high-income coffee drinkers while also targeting consumers who were new to the coffee category. This would help foundationally establish illy as a new coffee drinker’s brand of choice.
This combination of omnichannel tactics proved to be the perfect blend. The first three active months of the campaign saw a remarkable 99% lift in new-to-brand sales on Amazon compared to the prior quarter. For the same period, illy also surpassed its quarterly sales goals by 18% and recorded a 25% gain in overall market share.
By refocusing efforts on broad awareness, Tinuiti energized a new batch of illy brand enthusiasts, harvesting the seeds of long-term success and engagement.
Tinuiti’s expertise and strategic approach have been invaluable in helping us reach new customers. Their deep understanding of Amazon’s advertising ecosystem allowed us to tap into new media channels and optimize our campaigns beyond what we had imagined. The results speak for themselves; thousands of new customers have discovered and embraced illy coffee, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the partnership.
Javier Mendoza
Head of Digital & Commercial Operations, illy caffè
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