Case Study: From $6k to $310k in 5 months
My client was able to 50x their monthly revenue from $6k to $314k within 4 months of working with me to optimize their paid media strategy.
I'll take you through the steps. A couple pieces of context:
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This client had experienced extreme virality during covid and as a result made significant investments to scale their business. However, after lockdowns were lifted, they saw a significant drop off at about a third of the volume they had grown used to achieving.
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Ads that had once performed well seemed to grow stale overnight, and CAC had shot up so much that when I took on this project, all media spend had been paused.
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I had some great advantages and wasn't working from scratch. First off, the founder of this company had done an astounding job at collecting customer interviews and feedback. The amount of reviews, press, and positive coverage from industry professionals admittedly put me at a huge advantage. Their creative assets were well shot, and they had a good backlog of UGC stills.
For a wellness product, this client's customers erred more clinically curious than woo-woo. They did significantly more research and were initially more skeptical than most customers in the category. The product also requires a large amount of emotional labor to use. On the other hand, repeat purchase rates were high. This was the main problem driving up CAC: the consideration period outpaced the relatively cheap price, requiring my client to serve more and more ads.
STEP 01
Paid Media Audit
After carefully reviewing past campaigns, I noticed the client relied heavily on still creative, leveraging social proof from New York Times and Vogue coverage. Understanding the state of the world during Covid, the virality of the product during that period, and the current challenges, I placed a huge bet on the following hypothesis: When the end of lockdown was unclear, customers were more desperate and more willing to put in the emotional labor to use the product. As a result, the consideration period was relatively short. As restrictions eased up and other things competed for attention, the consideration period grew longer and more expensive.
So my main challenge was, how can we make the consideration period as short as possible? And a second question: why did the ads suddenly stop working?
STEP 02
Place your bets
Because this client had seen so much success with still social proof ads, they had not invested in any video content, and felt skittish about serving more expensive video ads. My bet was that serving the right video ads would significantly cut down the customer journey.
With a $1k budget for UGC, I sourced 3 creators from different demographics to create my first set of ads. To minimize cost, I created a comprehensive brief, script and shot list, and asked for raw footage only. I edited the ads myself, and also personally created a "prototype" version of the content for quality control. This proved to be extremely useful as the creators had a guideline and minimum standard to imitate.
Within the first month we hit $86k. Not too shabby.
STEP 03
Double Down
It felt like the first month's performance validated my hypothesis, and I decided to double down on my bets. With the new video content and the existing image content, we had a good base of creative to work with - I just had to reorganize them for the right audiences:
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Creative Testing Campaign - ABO - 3/5 Ads per ad set
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Scaling Campaign 1 - CBO - 2 ad sets
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Scaling Campaign 2 - CBO - 2 ad sets - with cost cap and higher budget
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Retargeting Campaign - MOF & BOF - ABO
New creatives we tested included tighter more engaging edits, mashups of winning creative, recreating winning creative scripts with extremely topical subliminal messaging and b roll (this was a cash cow).
By end of month 2, we hit $171k.
STEP 04
Background CRO Prep
During month 3, we didn't really test any new creative, instead pumping spend to the cusp of profitability. In the background, I began working through a site audit, adjusting copy, changing creative, designing new landing pages, and prepping CRO improvements to go live the following month.
Predictably, ROAS took a dive to 1.78, however revenue continued to climb steadily to $284k.
STEP 05
Site-level CRO Improvements Go Live
Typically, I wouldn't make so many changes in 1 month. A/B testing and all that. However, there were a number of common sense changes that were relatively low risk, coupled with an important holiday period looming close, so we went live with everything at once.
Here are the biggest changes we made:
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Implemented a dynamic one-click upsell at the cart level to drive up AOV
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Added more customer UGC to the product pages in lieu of highly editorial looking product imagery
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Added bundles to product catalogue to drive up AOV.
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Ran a site-wide 4 day sale with all products at 15% off. (The new customer welcome discount is 10%).
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Pumped the brakes on ad spend slightly to maintain ROAS.
At the end of month 4, we hit a record-breaking $314k at a 3.9 ROAS for the best sales month the client had seen in 2 years.
