CONSISTENTLY Scaling e-Commerce sales for one of the largest independent bath & body retailers in the U.S.
While established with 10+ retail locations across Florida, back in 2018 Naples Soap Company was still new to Facebook Advertising. The company’s goal was initially to support their existing Email Marketing efforts.
Our team laid out the strategy knowing we could quickly exceed expectations and started a process of Rapid Fire Testing to establish a baseline on the new marketing channel. We moved our first steps and identified top performing audiences and personas, creatives and offers, as well as formats - like engaging Canvas, carousels, single image and slideshow animations - to drive potential customers into a short funnel.
Within the first month we achieved 5X ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) while still in testing phase.
Our team later identified the opportunity to successfully scale ad spend. However, scaling budget while maintaining high performance right at the beginning of the holiday season is not an easy task. At this time, advertising costs start to rise and we are in a battle against time to build traffic volumes, so that we have a strong base of potential customers to retarget at the peak of November and December campaigns.
We promptly leveraged the data acquired in month one and invested heavily on prospecting, testing and validating a mix of dynamic high-intent cold audiences: these “value-based” and “high-AOV” Lookalikes helped us reach users similar to Naples Soap’s most valuable customers, more likely to spend higher amounts.
We then managed to scale ad spend by 700% while maintaining 4X ROAS overall.
This was a gradual and continuous effort, while testing different bid strategies and introducing a Middle of Funnel: we introduced strong warm audiences that were showing high intent of purchase, using a content dripping strategy.
By the first half of November, audiences were ripe, engaged and ready to buy; so we scaled down our Top of Funnel (cold audiences) and began allocating most of the spend towards those warm and hot audiences we had produced so far. Our strategy proved right.
We achieved 5.5X ROAS during the peak of the holiday season.
The company saw a 42% increase in total revenue and 78% increase in the numbers of November/December orders, when compared to the previous year. Then we did it again the next year, just a lot better, introducing new strategies based on what we had learned about customers buying patterns, top performing formats and calls-to-action.
For instance, we started incorporating Klaviyo synced audiences into some of our targeting and exclusions, in order to deliver a truly holistic and multi-channel approach.
This strategy was a boost for the entire funnel as it allowed us to benefit from the best targeting options from both platforms. Even with the best Email Marketing in place, open rates average 15%-25%; which means that 75% - 85% of email recipients can be left out. By capturing a portion of those audiences, we were able to add a highly converting traffic to our paid media efforts.
This cross-channel strategy was indeed two-ways. In the same way that email supported paid social, we developed an email acquisition campaign to support Email Marketing efforts: the campaign acquired 4,600+ new cold leads to be added to our retargeting and email campaign stack.
These efforts resulted in staggering performance: 8X ROAS overall between October and December, with peaks of 12X in November and 15X during Black Friday and Cyber Monday week.
But growth is only sustainable when it’s consistent over time. In Q1 2020, we continued to expand with a plan to scale month over month. Before Covid-19 started to affect the market, we were operating 6.5X ROAS, leveraging monthly offers and dropping our cost per acquisition. We were now acquiring new customers at a much lower cost while transitioning the brand to Campaign Budget Optimization (CBO), an entire new way of managing and optimizing budget with Facebook Ads. Again, not an easy task, in a constantly changing platform.
And yes, we did again, performing even better during an unprecedented pandemic. The ingredients of success?
√ A bit of luck. Beauty, skincare, bath & body are niches on the rise during these difficult times.
√ Overall ad cost decreased by 50%, once major companies and advertisers started to pull out budgets from Facebook and Instagram.
√ Reported 70% increase in internet usage - and consequently available placements.
√ Special offering: the team leveraged consumers buying in bulk by offering Buy One Get One half off or similar bulk bundles.
The team pivoted promptly and we shifted messaging right away to highlight natural soaps, hand-washing and products to alleviate stress. Additionally, we leveraged those offers by incorporating a series of Facebook Lives into different steps of the funnel. The effect was immediate.
Sales skyrocketed and our Facebook and Instagram Ad strategy drove unparalleled performance, closing March at 13.9X and April still running at a staggering 20X.
There’s no doubt that sales were up overall. But an optimized funnel and in-tune messaging made the difference between a good performance and an outstanding result.