How we doubled Vipshop's marketing efficiency by investing in awareness first.
Three mega-sales events in 90 days. Zero brand awareness. Conversion-focused campaigns burning cold-audience budget. We flipped the approach, and doubled MER.
Three mega-sales. Zero awareness.
Vipshop. One of China's largest flash-sale e-commerce platforms, was launching in Singapore with three mega-sales events (10.10, 11.11, Black Friday) within a 90-day window. The challenge: zero brand awareness, no consumer trust, and a Singaporean audience that hadn't heard of Vipshop.
The default playbook was conversion-focused campaigns from day one. But conversion ads against cold audiences burn budget. High CPMs, weak CTRs, conversion rates that stay below benchmark. The cost-per-install was climbing and mega-sales were 60 days away.
Pushing harder on conversion was making things worse, not better.
Awareness first. KOLs for trust. Reach & frequency for control.
We flipped the sequence. Two months of awareness investment before mega-sales. Paired with KOL trust-building and a four-tier remarketing funnel.
Invested heavily in upper-funnel awareness campaigns 60 days before the first mega-sale. Reach & Frequency buying guaranteed controlled exposure at scale. 2.5M reach, 18.4M impressions.
Joshua Tan as brand ambassador. KOL content layered to build cultural trust. Singaporean audiences saw familiar faces vouching for an unfamiliar brand.
Strategic TopView placement during the awareness phase drove 810K video views. Made Vipshop unmissable to the right audience at the right moment.
Built a sequenced remarketing system across Meta, TikTok, and Google. By the time mega-sales hit, audiences were warm and ready, conversion ads worked at fraction of the previous cost.
MER doubled. CPI down 44%. Cost-per-purchase halved.
Up from 3.07x baseline. Same conversion ads, dramatically warmer audiences, every dollar worked twice as hard.
$2.87 per install on iOS, $4.54 on Android. A 44% reduction in cost-per-install vs the cold-audience baseline.
782 in-app purchases at less than half the previous cost. Brand search volume spiked from November onwards as recognition compounded.
