In the wildly competitive world of gaming, every move matters. As one of the world’s most category-defining gaming brands that’s loved by professional gamers and esports teams around the world, SteelSeries needed a way to increase their overall net sales and search for new opportunities for growth while continuing the expansion of their product offerings. In order to capitalize on peak periods of e-commerce traffic, SteelSeries looked to build a strategy around better leveraging user data as a way of propelling their dotcom sales forward. With mounting data privacy concerns and limitations with tracking, SteelSeries faced the challenge of organizing, strategizing and utilizing valuable first-party data in a way that could unlock untapped e-commerce growth and drive dotcom sales to new heights.
Our approach leveraged first-party data to better understand different customer segments and target specific cohorts of interest-based audiences. For example, if users were tuning into Twitch, we’d know that they were gaming streamers who may be interested in purchasing a new streaming mic to upgrade their sound quality. This repository of user data was then translated into specific interest-based and engagement-based cohorts that served as hyper-specific target audiences for more personalized paid media initiatives.
While most e-commerce sites are able to leverage customer data to drive purchases based on past purchase, add-to-cart or browse behaviors, the seamless integration of software and hardware sales data unlocks a whole new arena of data to play with. Software-side first-party data, when used in conjunction with existing dotcom business data, enabled a more holistic view of users’ relationship with the SteelSeries brand as a whole, and informed more detailed audience cohorts from demographic, behavioral and psychographic perspectives.
SteelSeries experienced rapid month-over-month growth throughout 2023 led by a combination of paid acquisition efforts, marketplace management and personalization of the user journey. The brand experienced a +49% increase in net sales driven through paid social alone from Q2 to Q3, indicating the impact of a strong audience match.
Met with aggressive revenue targets, we worked to identify and target individual cohorts of users most likely to make repeat purchases. By incorporating site-wide and software-side first-party data, including gaming behavior and unique customer touch points, overall revenue from paid channels increased by +36%. SteelSeries increased monthly revenue 3x MoM, showing impressive long-term growth for the brand — a testament to the power of data-driven media amidst a highly competitive landscape.
