How Nestlé Coffee Partners brewed up new-to-brand sales for Starbucks Coffee At Home using AMC

Nestlé Coffee Partners (NCP) knows how to brew a great cup of joe—and for a number of years, their Starbucks Coffee At Home portfolio has helped customers elevate their daily fix with a diverse assortment of K-cup pods, roasts, blends, and other products. But after the pandemic, the brand needed to adjust to new patterns in consumer behavior to accelerate sales on the Amazon store.

“Consumer behavior changed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic—with many people returning to in-store shopping, especially in the coffee category,” said Stephanie Choi, senior manager of Amazon shopper marketing at NCP. “We wanted to get smarter and more granular about which types of audiences use the Amazon store as a primary way to discover new brands.”

With this goal in mind, NCP worked with Spark Foundry, a global media agency brand within Publicis Media, to identify key customer touchpoints that would help them increase new-to-brand (NTB) sales and Subscribe & Save subscription volume.

Spark Foundry used Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC), a secure, privacy-safe and cloud-based clean room solution from Amazon Ads, as a tool to help NCP’s Starbucks Coffee At Home uncover NTB opportunities by product.

As a first step, NCP and Spark Foundry developed a detailed list of key business questions that would help them be more strategic with which insights to extract from AMC. These inquiries focused on what primary factors (including which ad sources, audiences, and ad types) drive the best efficiency and volume of NTB sales and subscriptions.

After outlining these business questions, NCP and Spark Foundry explored instructional queries so that they could export the insights to direct specific actions, such as new-to-brand purchases and custom attribution. They were then able to make optimizations to NCP’s Amazon search advertising and Amazon DSP ad mix, ad type mix, keyword strategy, and overall product strategy that would help them increase NTB sales and subscription volume.

Through this approach, NCP’s Starbucks Coffee At Home saw significant improvements across a variety of key performance indicators from January to October 2023, compared to the corresponding period of the previous year.

Notably, Starbucks Coffee At Home realized significant increases in overall ad sales scale and exceeded the benchmark by 65% while also increasing return on ad spend (ROAS) by 54% above benchmark.¹ They also gained visibility into NTB performance, finding that NTB sales had increased 59% compared to the benchmark.² Additionally, they noted a 42% increase in Subscribe & Save subscription volume compared to the benchmark.³

“AMC allowed us to understand where we can drive incremental sales that have a higher lifetime value,” said Choi. “Not only did we find out where we could find these new-to-brand shoppers, but also how we could make them more valuable to the brand via subscription.”