Jaguar Singapore

Jaguar Singapore looked to create a whole new customer experience for their third Cyber Monday Auction campaign by holding the auction solely on their Facebook Messenger chatbot. The campaign ran for a week, with three phases – voting, model reveal and auction bidding.

The Challenge

Consumers are increasingly turning to the web as the first source of information when conducting their pre-purchase research, instead of physically visiting car showrooms to obtain first-hand information. Moreover, consumers are being served with large amounts of complex information, making it hard to capture their attention amidst all the clutter. Jaguar Singapore had to creatively come up with new and novel ways for users to interact and engage the brand via digital platforms, providing 24/7 easy access to all the relevant information in just a few clicks, without being restricted by the operating hours of brick-and-mortar retail showrooms.

The Solution

Looking to engage the automotive audience in new and novel ways aside from the traditional advertising channels, Jaguar Singapore kickstarted the first-ever automotive Cyber Monday digital campaign in 2016, and has been running this campaign for the past 2 years. In 2016 and 2017, Jaguar’s Cyber Monday campaigns featured different mechanisms and were hosted on the jaguar.com.sg website. Traffic was driven to the site via paid digital advertisements and the campaigns garnered PR coverage on online publications, print and radio.

Albeit effective in engaging their customers, these methods were isolated campaigns so capturing and consolidating leads for remarketing was a challenge. For 2018, Jaguar looked to establish themselves as the first movers in using AI technology for automotive marketing, by tapping on the Facebook Chatbot to reach their followers. Users were encouraged to interact with the chatbot and participate in the auction via Facebook ‘Click-to-Messenger’ ads.

VOTING - The chatbot was modified from its current functions to allow users to vote for the Jaguar models that they would like to see up on auction on Cyber Monday. A total of 6 Jaguar models were up for bidding over the course of 3 days. During this time, users were able to vote for their favourite Jaguar or view product details through the Jaguar website. Consequently, this also helped drive traffic to Jaguar’s website and heightened viewership. Through the voting exercise, the chatbot was also able to tag and segment these users according to their preferred Jaguar car models. By acquiring these user insights, Jaguar were able to subsequently retarget these users for future campaigns and increase engagement via personalised content.

THE AUCTION - The three selected Jaguar car models up for auction were revealed via a chatbot message broadcast to all users that had interacted with the bot for the Cyber Monday campaign. Users were then prompted to register to participate in the Cyber Monday Auction bidding. For registration, users were required to place a deposit via Paypal – this mechanism was incorporated within the chatbot. The Cyber Monday Auction lasted for 24 hours, from 00:00 to 23:59. Users who had registered for the auction were able to bid for the model that they had placed a deposit on. Real-time message notifications were sent to the users when they were out-bidded, with a message that prompted them to ‘Add Bid’ should they wish to continue participating in the auction.

RETARGETING - A retargeting campaign was carried out a week after the Cyber Monday Chatbot Auction to further engage the new users that were acquired. A total of 6 user segments were acquired from the Cyber Monday Auction, based on their interests in the various Jaguar car models. These users were re-engaged via personalised broadcast messaging and Click-to-Messenger ads for Jaguar’s Christmas Market event. This helped drive test drive bookings and footfall to the Jaguar showroom.

The Results

The Cyber Monday Chatbot Auction campaign garnered 81 times more users within the span of 1 week and achieved 76.7% participation rate for the auction campaign. The average daily users have also increased by 45 times, with a high user retention rate of 26.4% maintained. Through this campaign, Jaguar was also able to obtain deeper insights on Facebook customer preferences, allowing them to tailor their content and promotional messaging to suit the respective target audiences.

The retargeting campaign has effectively boosted the chatbot retention rate to 41.9%, and the broadcast has obtained an average Open Rate of 69.8% and average CTR of 57.6%.