Impact
Transformed a modest online sales of $559,000 in 2018 to a substantial $4.67 million in 2024 averaging around 45% YoY growth over 6 years while improving the MER at the same time through strategic digital marketing and operational enhancements. Overall, revenue improved by 820% from $0.6M in 2018 to $4.67M in 2024. Also, ad spend increased by 712%
Challenge
A D2C brand operating since 2014, struggled with minimal online traction even 4 years after its launch. The gross sales were stuck at below $30K monthly when we started working on the brand. Despite the brand having a compelling product offering, there was limited brand visibility, minimal digital infrastructure, and poor conversion performance. Our team was brought in with a clear mandate:
- Scale the staggered revenue for the past four years since the launch
- Launch and scale digital marketing campaigns
- Achieve this with minimal MER fluctuation
- Fix their data flow & attribution
Solution (Strategic Interventions 2018 – 2024)
Performance Analytics & Attribution
- Evaluating & optimizing cohorts acquired through different channels at different stages of marketing to improve the audience quality
- Used first-party data to optimize CPA, ROAS, and LTV
- Ran iterative A/B tests on creatives, landing pages, and offers, pre & post purchases
- Used attribution tools to find out the winning bundle products, best sellers etc. to optimize the marketing spend
- Use attribution tools like TripleWhale to measure blended ROAS and budget reallocation opportunities among different platforms
Meta Ads
- Post ios 14.5 update in 2021, we started using default shortened attribution windows of 7-day click-only default window which replaced 28-day click-through and 7-day view-through windows. Further changed the attribution window to 1-day click only because 94% of the sales were happening within 24 hours
- Started relying less on retargeting and lookalike audiences due to declined audience quality and reduced audience data inputs.
- Increased emphasis on first-party data collection (email/SMS opt-ins). Also, enhanced creative testing and broader audience targeting.
- Began using newly introduced Aggregated Event Measurement then on Facebook to prioritize top 8 conversion events per domain
- Integration of CAPI and server-side tracking along with introduction of attribution tools such as TripleWhale / Hyros as a single source source of truth across all the marketing channels
- Leveraged features such as campaign budget optimization (CBO), DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization) to reduce creative testing period.
- Later, starting early 2024, started testing creative enhancements while maintaining the brand integrity to further boost the ROAS on Meta.
- Started gradually switching the campaigns over to ASC+ campaigns and moving away from the standard campaigns to more feed-based automated campaigns
- Started testing website+shop as ad destination instead of just website
Google Ads
- Started gradually replacing Shopping campaigns with Performance Max campaigns starting 2022 and early 2023
- Relying more on automated bidding & passing more first-party data as signal
- Enhanced conversion implementation
- Optimizing Google Merchant Centre by adding more product level attributes and integrating different tools to pass more user & product level data
- We were able to scale the spend over year while maintaining the ROAS
TikTok Ads
- Used program tools such as TikTok One, to create trending ad creatives
- Launched influencer collaborations and user-generated content initiatives through TikTok Creative Challenge program to acquire new customers on TikTok
- Leveraged UGC content from top influencers to launch some of the best performing ads
- Used tools like Skippers for UGC videos and influencer marketing
Pinterest Ads
- Used Pinterest primarily as the top of the funnel traffic acquisition channel
- Leveraged boards, Hashtags, pins etc. to generate more organic as well as paid clicks
- Leveraged targeting such as interests, keywords etc. to drive more targeted and qualified top of the funnel traffic using viral pins
- Launched campaigns optimizing mostly for pin engagements to drive more top of the funnel traffic
Email & SMS
- Improved email and SMS automation for retention
- Launched more automations and personalized flows to capture/ recapture users at different stages of funnels such as lost users, dormant users, high-value users, more likely to buy users, lead scoring etc.
Feed Optimization
- As we realized that most of the platforms such as Meta, TikTok, Pinterest etc. started giving more emphasis on their social stores, and feed being the sole source of the product data attributes in these feed-based stores, we launched the initiative of optimizing the product feed and product attributes
- Optimized & passed as many product attributes as possible and passed them to social store through feed
- Created product sets based on AOV, CAC & CVR to push more budget towards the top-selling products & sets
Inventory & Fulfilment Scale-up
- Expanded product SKUs and bundles.
- Launched new product sets
- Phased out struggling products
Marketing Efforts Expansion & Testing
- Segregated the user acquisition efforts on different channels. Used different attribution modelling for this effort
- Launched & tested new channels such as Pinterest, LiveIntent, Microsoft Ads etc. for acquiring more qualified audience cohorts at different stages of the funnel
- Launched Shopify-native shop campaigns for re-acquiring lost users as well new users