Due to recent events, the 2020 Performance Marketing Awards took place virtually yesterday afternoon. The 14th edition of the awards was due to take place on April 28 at the iconic Grosvenor House Hotel on London’s Park Lane but people were encouraged to celebrate the performance marketing industry at home or with their teams.

From the 28 categories, the Best Influencer Marketing Campaign category caught our eye. The award was sponsored by the Influencer Marketing Show and was awarded to Cult Beauty for its campaign with influencer Lydia Elise Millen.

Cult beauty

For the third year running, Cult Beauty is Britain’s fastest-growing multi-brand beauty etailer (The Sunday Times Fast Track 100, 2017-2019). Starting back in May 2015, The Cult Beauty Box has become one of the most iconic influencer collaboration models that the beauty sphere has seen.

Cult Beauty works closely with each influencer to curate an edit of selected products housed in a beautiful co-designed luxury box, coupled with a fully-fledged comms plan which is vital to the success of the project. A campaign that was six months in the making with award-winning beauty and lifestyle influencer, Lydia Elise Millen, launched in December 2019 and amassed a multi-channel reach of 6.5 million users across YouTube, Instagram and Twitter alone,

with total revenue surpassing target by 12% and new customer acquisition exceeding target by 16 percentage points.

The campaign

Cult Beauty places huge value on email sign-ups, considering the entire conversion funnel rather than just traffic and revenue. For this reason, the premise of this campaign meant that only those who signed up to the waitlist – exclusively marketed through Lydia’s channels – were able to purchase the box, resulting in email data capture as well as revenue. All those who signed up to the waitlist received one of Lydia’s favourite products for free upon purchasing the box. This served as a dual-purpose of increasing initial sign-ups as well as encouraging conversion.

Thanks to their world-class gifting programme, Cult Beauty was able to secure press samples free of charge from all brands involved. The collaboration was gifted to 10 of Lydia’s key industry friends on the day of Lydia’s reveal video. Similarly, Cult Beauty reached out to the participating brands, sharing assets and launch details which enabled them to support on their own social channels.

“Yet again, working with the team at Cult Beauty to produce the fourth box with Lydia has been a brilliant experience. The team are so switched on to changes in the industry and are the first to champion new ways of working. I love working with the CB team, Lydia loves working with the CB team and we hope it can continue to more and more game-changing ways of working together,” commented Carrie Grayson, COO of LEM Online Ltd.

View the PMA highlights here and find out who took gold and why by downloading the official Book of the Night.

International Performance Marketing Awards

Want to compete against worldwide campaigns? You’re just in time for the Final Entry Deadline for the 2020 International Performance Marketing Awards.  Entry deadlines have been extended from July to allow companies a bit more time this year. You have seven working days left, so make sure you submit your entries by 3 September at the lastest to be in with a chance.

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