How Productsup helped Leroy Merlin Spain attain double-digit growth on Pinterest

Case

Leroy Merlin Spain belongs to Leroy Merlin Group (part of GROUPE ADEO), which is known as one of the largest players in the global DIY market. Leroy Merlin Group operates more than 400 stores across 12 countries, employing 100,000 people. In Spain, Leroy Merlin operates 133 of these stores, including department, concept, and express stores and has roughly 18,000 employees. The company mainly offers products and solutions for DIY, decoration, construction, and gardening.

Before implementing Productsup, the distribution of product data to different sales and marketing channels proved to be a tedious task for Leroy Merlin Spain’s marketing team. The department was manually uploading the data to social channels and had to rely on the IT team to support them with customized data files. Leveraging the Productsup Product-to-Consumer platform, the marketing team has been able to take full control of feed management, creating ready-to-use feed exports for their 50 marketing and sales channels. The team has improved efficiency of its marketing operations significantly across all channels. On Pinterest, for example, their average shopping cart value increased by 11%.

Challenges

• Dependency on IT department
• Tedious manual workload
• Slow time-to-market

The marketing team at Leroy Merlin Spain was struggling to get its product data out to different channels. To deliver data in channel-required formats, they relied on support from their IT department to develop customized export files for each channel.

Meanwhile, they were forced to manually upload product data to social channels, like Instagram. Onboarding new products and keeping product information up-to-date was extremely time-consuming and kept the team from working on strategic tasks.

As a result of this dependence on the IT team and manual data uploads, Leroy Merlin Spain experienced a slow time-to-market. By the time it added new product data online, the information was already outdated once it reached their customers.

Solutions

• Full control of their feed management
• Quick and easy channel setup
• Seamless integration with other tools

Since Leroy Merlin Spain implemented the Productsup P2C platform, their marketing team has gained the freedom to take full control of its product feed management without having to rely on the support of their internal IT department. The platform equips the team with easy-to-use feed templates for all social channels, like Facebook, Pinterest, and Google Shopping, which can be set up quickly and effortlessly.

This was particularly helpful when Leroy Merlin had to adjust its operations in light of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company had to shift their whole business model from physical stores to ecommerce. Productsup helped Leroy Merlin quickly introduce new social channels like Pinterest to their marketing mix in order to keep the business running successfully.

Leroy Merlin also runs its own online community where people can post about their favorite products and showcase their DIY success. With Productsup, the team was able to integrate its product catalog with this platform, enabling users to tag their favorite products in posts that link to their online shop. This also works for live shopping events where Leroy Merlin can showcase thumbnails of products presented by influencers.

Results

• Efficient distribution of product data
• Fast time-to-market
• Increase in distributed SKUs

Now, Leroy Merlin Spain is leveraging nearly 50 different product feeds with the Productsup platform, exporting more than five million SKUs to various channels like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Google Shopping, Bing, Awin, and more.

When the company decided to introduce Pinterest as a new advertising and sales channel, it only took them a few days to go live with its feed. The channel was critical for Leroy Merlin, as Pinterest’s user community is hyper-focused on home improvements and DIY.
Shortly after adding the channel as an export, they observed that the average shopping cart value increased by 11%. This success story also helped Leroy Merlin Spain to allocate their paid media budget efficiently, investing more in Pinterest paid ads.

They also achieved significant improvements on other sales and marketing channels, for instance, Google Shopping. Using the Productsup platform, Leroy Merlin Spain was able to expand its product catalog on Google Shopping by adding its marketplace products to the channel. This resulted in an increase from 100,000 to 600,000 SKUs on Google.

Future plans

Looking ahead, Leroy Merlin Spain is planning to explore even more platform capabilities with Productsup, such as the error monitoring functionality. The marketing team also aims to take advantage of Productsup’s Academy training and certifications to always stay on top of what’s new in the platform.