Venus et Fleur is a luxury floral atelier that intersects the romantic tradition of sending flowers with exceptionally stylish designs. Its luxurious blooms have been acclaimed by numerous celebrities, from LeBron James to the Kardashians, and featured in countless media outlets, including Harper’s Bazaar, CNN, and Vogue.

As a leading name in the luxury floral market, Venus et Fleur relies on a dynamic social presence and paid ads to drive demand for its coveted collections. While the brand saw initial success building and targeting audiences using its storefront data, the traction wasn't significant enough to drive material results on Meta and TikTok. As both platforms continued to circulate Venus et Fleur's ads to the same audiences, CPMs began to swell, and Director of Performance Marketing Angela Marsh knew she needed a more precise audience targeting solution to extract the full value from each platform — especially with their biggest sales event of the year just around the corner.

Having already experimented with the usual targeting suspects — from interest stacks to lookalikes to broad (with a heavy dose of creative iteration) — Angela decided it was time to take a more data-focused approach to Venus et Fleur's audience targeting strategy. She knew her primary blocker was a lack of first-party data. The brand's customer lists and site traffic data were a good start, but they weren’t enough to scale profitably. Angela needed a data enrichment tool that could help feed granular customer information (beyond her pixel and customer list uploads) into Venus et Fleur's ad platforms to boost their signal and allow them to reach new high-intent audiences.

Early into her search, Angela discovered Proxima. After a short 15-minute demo, she knew our vast reserves of aggregated shopper data and bespoke advertising resources were exactly what Venus et Fleur needed to take its paid media strategy to the next level.

Mother’s Day (the Super Bowl for floral shops) was on the horizon, and Angela needed to get her new audience targeting strategy underway, and fast. Within 24 hours, the Proxima team had dialed into our Shopper Universe — an expansive dataset of 70+ million shoppers and $17B+ in purchases across thousands of eCommerce stores — to generate boosted seed audiences of users whose shopping behaviors mimicked Venus et Fleur's top customers. These behaviors include the stores they frequently purchase from, average order value, and even details like which flowers and vases each customer purchases.

"I feel like we got up and running almost immediately. The Proxima team is always ready to make strategic pivots, especially during major sales periods. They've been incredible to work with."

Angela knew Mother's Day would be Venus et Fleur's biggest opportunity of the year to drive brand awareness and conversions. During the hours leading up to this major sales event, she established several split tests to compare the performance of Proxima's AI Audiences against her own manually-built audiences. What she found was shocking.

As Venus et Fleur scaled Meta spend (+31.4%) with Proxima’s audiences, they saw a lift in NC-ROAS (+13.2%) and significant improvement in CPA (-28.6%).

Not only were Proxima's audiences outperforming Venus et Fleur's existing audiences considerably on Meta, but they were also driving noticeable performance on TikTok, a platform Angela had been close to abandoning. This lift gave her the confidence to lean further into her Proxima campaigns and considerably scale TikTok spend (+73.3%) so that Venus et Fleur could extract the most value from the Mother's Day rush.

Following this Mother’s Day victory, Venus et Fleur has begun leveraging Proxima to generate audiences based on even more granular information, such as SKU-level purchase data. For instance, if Angela sees that Steve, one of Venus et Fleur’s high-value customers, buys his mom Large Round Eternity Roses every year, Proxima can dive into his global purchase data to develop a more holistic understanding of his shopping habits. We can then use Steve as a baseline to identify other high-intent users in our Shopper Universe who have similar habits but haven’t purchased that hero SKU from Venus et Fleur yet. This process lays the foundation for a lookalike audience that Angela can target with SKU-specific ad creative, helping her significantly boost the quality and performance of Venus et Fleur's paid ads.

Today, Proxima’s high-performing AI Audiences have become a core pillar of Venus et Fleur's paid media strategy and have reinvigorated the brand’s approach to advertising during major sales events. Venus et Fleur’s TikTok performance makes the most convincing case of all. Since the partnership began, the brand has profitably increased its TikTok budget more than tenfold — and naturally allocated every dollar of it to Proxima.

Angela’s inclination to experiment with audience targeting and lean into AI-powered lookalikes has more than paid off. Since partnering with Proxima, the brand has efficiently scaled its top-of-funnel marketing, unlocked incremental reach, and profitably increased ad spend on Meta and TikTok.

And the results speak for themselves: 

• 73% increase in Ad Spend
• 29% reduction in CPA
• 13% increase in NC-ROAS

Moving forward, Angela is eager to leverage Proxima's AI-powered business analytics and creative briefs to improve her creative production flywheel, reduce wasted spend on inefficient tests, and drive increased LTV from Venus et Fleur's expanding customer base.