Made-to-measure suit brand Indochino, originally launched as an e-commerce site, has been growing its brick-and-mortar business quickly, with retail generating 50% of new customers these days. This means generating in-store traffic is crucial, something the businesses is accomplishing through a mix of social media ads and localized landing pages.

Following Indochino's launch in 2007, the company found success with pop-up events and has been opening retail stores in recent years. The company has 20 showroom locations around the country, eight of which opened in the past year. The brand plans to open as many as 18 more in 2018 — four southern U.S. locations were announced last month — and is on a mission to build brand awareness and get people into those stores. The business recently received a strategic investment from Mitsui & Co., which could help accelerate expansion plans.

However, as Indochino has grown, it became apparent that its use of paid social to raise awareness of its brand and services no longer made the cut because the ads drove users to a one-size-fits-all landing page.

"We were sending paid traffic to landing pages that spoke about Indochino and the showroom experience but they didn't speak specifically to the users' market, and this made it really difficult to let the user know there was a showroom in their city or to communicate a special kind of offer," Lisa Craveiro, director of acquisition at Indochino told Marketing Dive.

"Retail is such a significant driver of our business these days, and it speaks to the need for these landing pages because segmentation and personalization [are] becoming increasingly important for us and for a lot of marketers out there," she said.

A quick build

The company was running social media ads to relevant audiences, but the challenge was to talk about these showrooms on a more local level. The idea was that if a person in Nashville, Tennessee, for instance, saw an ad for the service, they would be directed to book an appointment at the local showroom and see the local address, but the company wasn't sure how to pull this off.

So the brand teamed up with marketing services provider Unbounce to help. First they experimented with content marketing editorial pieces to convert Facebook ad traffic. Second, they worked together to build templates for hyper-localized landing pages that promoted showroom locations in a consumer's area, which they were quick to push out and alter on-the-fly. They aligned these landing pages with ads so that a consumer would land on a page that was relevant to the ad content that had piqued their interest.

The partnership helped the brand avoid in-house time lags from the tech department. "We can build these high converting landing pages quickly and easily without having to rely on our own tech developers and the typical bottlenecks of working with different departments," Craveiro said.

This resulted in landing pages that are customized based on a consumer's location. So the Nashville prospect would see an ad promoting the Nashville showroom, and the landing page would match the ad copy. In about nine months, these landing pages counted 340,000 visitors, 800 showroom bookings — accounting for 77% of the brand's in-store showroom bookings year-over-year — 40 online purchases and 750 email opt-ins.

Craveiro attributes some of the success to the brand doing A/B testing once the localized pages had been built. The company could then "easily see what's working and what's not working and move on accordingly," she said. "We have tested sending people directly to a showroom and booking page versus having a landing page that speaks more about the brand, and we have seen higher conversion results because of these tests."

Promoting key partnerships

Indochino plans to continue to build localized landing pages to target men for its growing footprint. In addition to promoting new markets, Indochino is also building specialized landing pages to help promote its various new partnerships, which include associations with The New York Yankees and The Knot. These landing pages will help Indochino get quickly to market now that these partnerships are complete.

"Once you have done all the leg work to set up partnerships like these, it's important to be able to leverage these deals very quickly and mobilize to be able to pull off the best campaign possible," said Jennifer Pepper, head of content at Unbounce.

Indochino is already rolling out wedding-specific ads and matching landing pages, as men are beginning to purchase suits for the summer wedding season. "Weddings are a huge part of our business," Craveiro said. "We've developed some wedding-specific landing pages as a kind of lead-gen approach."

No matter which segment, the company is relying on digital to drive business in the physical world.

"With each new market that we enter, our goal is always to introduce the brand to the city and to drive showroom appointments," Craveiro said.