21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC November is said to be one of the toughest trading months of the year for online retailers and also potentially the most lucrative. But we implemented a winning formula that works for us all year round - except the results were magnified! We first spoke to the client in August and their challenge was to significantly increase YOY sales and drive them up from 7-figures to deliver an 8-figure revenue within a 6 month time period. And also whilst maintaining a cold audience ROAS of above 5X, and blended ROAS (with retargeting) above 10X. For a $200 AOV product this was a tall order but they had some ingredients already in place: a great product and great understanding of their customer. The store sold ski and snowboarding apparel/gear with AOVs in the $200 range. Store owner, Linus, ran ads himself previously but with a growing team and customer demand, wanted to bring an agency on board to take over and to accelerate growth and put the challenge to the team at SM Commerce. Here’s the low-down of what we achieved: ● $7M+ revenue with just $340K in ad spend (21X ROAS) in November alone ● An early launch Thanksgiving Thursday promotion with 48X ROAS turning $5K spend into $240K+ in sales revenue ● Generating over $15M revenue in 3 months And for those that are impatient to read here’s the summary: ● LOTS of fast testing in September to find audience and ads that worked ● Found winners and scaled confidently ● Scaled hard whilst maintaining super low CPMs ($5-10 in Q4) and a decent website conversion rate (3-4%) 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC ● ● Unleashed a CBO scaling strategy with big success and 5-figure daily spends Completely smashed Black Friday with a pre-launch promotion delivering 48X ROAS For those that want to unpick the details, let’s jump in! Below are the 9 biggest takeaways we took from this crazy campaign. 1: THE FACEBOOK ADS SECRET SUCCESS SAUCE Old fashioned marketing; the secret sauce to sustainable, fast-growth with Facebook ads. Obvious? Great you’re ahead of many Facebook ads marketers struggling to create consistent results. The barrier of entry to advertise on Facebook is so low, that simply boosting a page post allows anyone to advertise. Realistically, how many of your Page posts would qualify as an ad that addresses pain points, understands your avatar and creates a hook good enough to generate a click let alone a sale? At the core of the most successful Facebook ads campaigns is creative marketing. It’s one of the key pillars that need to be in place in order to be able to scale a campaign to the moon. And it doesn’t need a big budget or a marketing degree to get good at marketing either. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC Facebook advertising is a lot about shifting states - if a user is on the Facebook platform (and by this, I mean any Facebook owned platform you can advertise on including Instagram) then they are not there to buy. It’s the same principle as TV - who actually watches a TV show waiting for the ads? But as with TV, Facebook users have accepted ads as part of the experience. Can you scale a campaign with sub-par creative execution? Sure. Can you sustain it, unlikely. Facebook place big emphasis on the user experience; as an advertiser you cannot ignore this. Facebook introduced Relevance Score in 2015 to grade your ads in the auction and followed it up with User Feedback in 2018, allowing Facebook users to rate a store’s buying and post purchase experience. A way of further grappling with poor quality user experiences and ultimately leading to account bans. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC With this Ecommerce store however, both brand image and user experience were core elements of the outward message we wanted to reflect to potential customers. We wanted to evoke the feelings of coolness, community and FOMO (fear of missing out) that the store exudes. This representation of how people could feel owning the product leads to DESIRE; people feel like they NEED what you sell. Every project we begin starts by looking at the business with a marketing lens, starting with researching the niche and competition, building an avatar and testing the angles and propositions. For an early stage business there is more guesswork involved in building an avatar but in particular we use the 5W Avatar Model to uncover, in particular, emotional angles we can play on, functional benefits we can reinforce and most importantly, to uncover objections. Those objections combined with appealing towards the emotional, irrational benefits of what you’re selling are a crucial way of cutting through the noise. Once we knew via research and testing that the biggest motivator was the experience of being on the slopes and the biggest trigger being the bright colours and lifestyle images, everything else was built around this and their functional benefits. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC 2: THE 21X PRIMER: FAST BITE-SIZED TESTING With the creative direction for this store we kept things super simple and typically looked for 3 key elements - brand, personality and environment. We wanted a focus on the brand experience itself, the essence of the creative had to FEEL something - cool, fun, intriguing, and it needed to be clear that the brand was a snow/ski apparel brand, which we achieved through use of environment. Here’s how we approached testing using the Graduation Framework: 1. The basic account structure at this stage was a COLD campaign for prospecting and HOT campaign for retargeting those that had visited but not purchased. Our testing approach uses a Campaign designed for testing and another designed for scaling. Once a full account structure is setup, we introduce a set of WARM campaigns (targeting those that have engaged in an ad, video, page, etc. but not yet clicked) and an EXISTING customer campaign to focus on LTV (lifetime value). However in the early stage, the simpler the setup, the better. A typical mature account thus follows the below setup: 1. COLD (prospecting) 2. WARM (engaged - video views, IG/FB engagers, email etc) 3. HOT (retargeting - web traffic, view content, add to cart) 4. EXISTING (retention - past purchasers, cross sell) We created a launch plan based on historical data found within Facebook and Google Analytics combined with our understanding of shifting market trends within the sector. This meant we broke out our COLD prospecting campaigns into 9 core countries initially with the goal of finding breakout winners to scale. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC We also split out our HOT DPA campaigns in the same way which gave us greater flexibility over the product sets we promoted and translations per country. 2. We initially tested 12-16 creatives across 3-5 different audiences in ONE country (a range of Interest based audiences and LAAs) using rules to pause ads once a certain impressions threshold was met. For this particular store the best correlation was between cost per ATC (Add To Cart) and CPA/ROAS. Therefore, ATC was our lead metric to benchmark performance. With the initial round of testing we were looking to consolidate the 12-16 creatives down to 6-8 by finding our strongest set of creative/copy pairings across the 3-5 audiences. With our strongest 6-8 creatives, we tested against a range of different seed audiences: - Interest based - Broad targeting - Lookalikes based on all stages of the funnel As with our initial round of testing, we found that 50-70% of the creatives had a good audience fit but it’s NOT always the same 50-70% for different audiences. If an 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC audience had less than a 50% creative/audience match, we looked into the specific creatives that are working and create some variations. If that does not create better results, the audience is simply no good and we scrap it. It’s important to understand that groups of people in your audience may need different creative messages to nudge them into taking action on your ad which is why we test lots of ad variations for any given ad set. 3. Through testing we discovered that high contrast close ups gave us the best performance for good front end metrics - but don’t be tricked into thinking CTR (clickthrough rate) is of importance when it comes to profiting and scaling - many of our best ads had a CTR of 0.8-0.9% which you might consider poor - yet our ROAS hitting 10-20X would tell you otherwise. Instead, we initially focussed testing on getting a good cost per Initiate Checkout (IC) and in particular, testing creatives with up to 5,000 impressions. If we got a sale, we knew we were on to a winner. With our CPM (cost per thousand impressions) at around $5 that meant we could test each ad with $25 - with an average order value (AOV) of around $200 and generating 1-2 sales we knew we had a strong signal of success from the start using the Graduation Testing Method. This is a core secret to ads that get attention and have action taken - using a series of techniques, such as a face looking directly at the user in the newsfeed or stories, using high contrast images which ‘pop’ and testing to find the best ad formats for each set of videos and images we had. Just don’t focus too heavily on CTR and look further down the funnel for a measure of the quality of traffic. I’d take low CTR and high conversion rates all day long! 4. We implemented the 3N Ads Formula, which is derived from the AIDA marketing principle: Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action. The 4-steps to taking your prospect from not being aware of your business, to creating that desire in them to take action. It’s the model I’ve been using for many years and still surprises me that people are not aware of it. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC We use a concept built from this called the 3N Ads Formula - at the core, there are only 3 things we’re interested in achieving for an ad: - STOP users from scrolling past our ad ENGAGE them in our ad to read, watch, and take an interest CONVERT them into an action You goal is to nudge them (hence the 3Ns) from one state to the next. Whilst I’m a big believer in balancing great copy with great creative, I can also confirm that strong visual creative far outweighs copy. Take a look at the example below which is one of our strongest performing ads. We tried multiple copy variants, short and long, using various types of ‘best practice’ copy templates and none of them beat this version. Why? Because the copy didn’t matter as much as the visual. This ad stopped people in their tracks and said a 1,000 words more than we could write. The power of brand-led performance marketing right here. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC That said, bad copy would have taken this ad the other way - "BUY NOW EMOJI EMOJI up to 60% off" would not have worked for this store. This is the approach taken by many novice store owners trying to get users to click at any cost - quality of clicks matters more than quantity as we saw with low CTR and high website conversion rates. 5. Through the Graduation Testing Method we concentrated on high output testing. Each ad set had around $50-$150 per day for testing. The idea was to test fast and test at scale. With up to 5K impressions, we knew if we had a winner based on sales. But in many cases, 2K impressions was enough to allow us to gauge success based on cost per ATC as a proxy for likely success. We tested formats (carousel, static, videos, collections) as well as various stylised shots (single man, single woman, two men, two women, a man and woman, various garments, colours, poses etc.). With this rapid based testing you can churn through 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC many variants at low cost before ‘graduating’ the winners to test if you can replicate the same with higher spend. In pretty much all cases, this worked as expected. We started the above in September with fast testing and a goal of scaling aggressively for Christmas and peak Q4. At that point the store was already doing 6-figure months in revenue but we needed to 20X that quickly! Ideally, you’d enter September having already spent months testing and building up your creatives and audiences so this isn’t a recommended strategy to start so late heading into Q4! For reference, the budget was around 90% testing, 10% retargeting, with the test budget reduced as we found winners and started to scale up, leaving around 20% for testing, and the rest split between scaling and retargeting. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC 3: THE LOW CPM TRICK TO MAXIMISE ROAS An important update Facebook made in early 2018 was to shift to ‘meaningful interactions’ as a way of measuring post engagement. This meant posts which asked people to comment, or posts which Facebook deemed as low quality were penalised in favour of posts that gained quality engagement in the form of more than one word comments, with threaded replies amongst other things. However, one shift that many missed was the impact on Page engagement - it’s a common tactic of low quality advertisers to create new Pages and start running ads against them with little regard for the page. In reality, a legit business is going to go to some lengths to ensure their Page is of good quality, sharing regular content and growing their fans following in a predictable way. In every ad account we worked with the past 12 months, those with high, organic engagement (using ads to promote the better content for higher reach) attracted a lower 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC CPM. Whilst this alone doesn’t guarantee a low CPM, it’s certainly a tried and tested way of ensuring your CPMs and thus profitability remain strong. We use the GC10X Method to bring about better CPMs - testing potential page posts as ads for high engagement and pushing the best into the Page and supporting with ad spend to further help reach because of Facebook’s shift towards meaningful engagement. Don't look for posts to simply create likes, shares and comments, but whether it enhances the User's experience on Facebook.. Facebook rewards high engagement right now more than simply gaining likes on the post. In the example above we tested 3 posts via ads to fans with about the same spend (about $100) - the results were clear that the middle post gained far more traction, not just in likes but in comments. It captured people’s imagination and gained virality through the copy together with an amazing video of a skier balancing a ski on one foot before slipping it back on whilst skiing on one left; totally impressive in execution all round! 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC 4: SCALING PREDICTABLY & PROFITABLY Going back before Q1 of 2018, the scaling techniques we used were more focussed on H-Scaling (horizontal scaling through duplicating ad sets and segmenting into age, gender, placements, devices, etc. with higher budgets). However, Facebook changed the game with the algorithm favouring ad set history and stability around Q1 2018 - including changing the previously required 25-30 conversions per week for a given ad set running a Conversion campaign objective, to now requiring a minimum of 50. Our approach for scaling with this account was initially looking at V-Scaling (scaling budgets up), which Facebook again made another update with allowing you to bump budgets up by 40% per day without affecting the learning phase, or so Facebook say. We bumped 30% per day using these rules: We’re big fans of Revealbot but you can likely set this up using Facebook’s built-in rules engine or other software. The idea with this rule is, with our ROAS goal for COLD (prospecting) ads at 5x minimum ROAS, to scale automatically at 7am each morning by 25% if the above rules are met. We’re looking at yesterday’s performance and the average of the last 3-days being positive before scaling up - we noticed when frequency was higher than 2 over 3 days performance would start to drop so we included this as a fail-safe. It’s a steady and slow way of scaling, but it was readying us for faster growth. It’s a key part of the GT-CBO Method which you’ll read about shortly - it’s the bridge between the fast-iterative testing and being able to scale harder. When testing since we usually test higher funnel optimisation events like ATC or IC, scale testing is using these plus the Purchase event to see which yields the best performance. For a $200 AOV product, often optimising for IC works better - it’s very close to the Purchase pixel event, so you get high quality, in-market people from your audience, but it’s often cheaper. Sales are then pulled in through retargeting. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC However for this account, despite it being a high AOV store, we found the Purchase event brought the best ROAS - with our low CPMs, high relevance scores and 3-4% website conversion rates we had the right foundations to scale this hard. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC 5: GEO SCALING FOR FASTER GROWTH Whilst not all Ecom stores can scale into multiple locations, many are probably not taking advantage of the opportunities to test new markets. In our case, we were able to work with the store owner in markets that they had translation capabilities in but also to test and validate new markets using English ad copy, website and the Euro currency as our main target was to scale in Europe. A key part of our strategy was to implement our testing process, whilst learning which ads, creatives, copy, CTA would work in different markets. It’s a marketing fact that cultural differences do lead us to react differently to creative and copy. So don’t assume that a country has failed because those killer ads from your lead market didn’t work. Do your research - especially by spying on ads from competitors in that new market using the Info & Ads link on their Page (thanks Facebook!). Our preference is to split key markets into separate campaigns mainly so we can test local differences and also test local language ads for markets that showed greater traction. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC One Facebook tool that did help with scaling was implementing dynamic language ads allowing us to write an ad in up to 5 different languages - very useful for retargeting, despite the downside of not being able to bulk up social proof or analyse the ads at an individual level. When you’re scaling to 20-30 different countries, every optimisation matters. The other tip is to use a catch-all Worldwide retargeting campaign, to capture sales in countries you might be attracting visitors from organically via your Page or through small spends in prospecting campaigns. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC 6: HIGH ROAS CREATIVE USING MIND HACKS Throughout testing we aim to ensure we don’t take our opinions or ideas from other accounts into new campaigns which may cloud our judgement. Instead, we’re always testing with audiences to see which ad format and creative work best and letting data dictate our decisions; with this account it was Collection Ads that blew the roof off of performance - to the tune of $153k in ad spend in November alone. This ad format delivered a performance-driven ad experience that still felt lifestyle and brand focused. After testing core elements and refining our approach, below are the learnings that allowed us to deliver a HUGE 8.6x ROAS with COMPLETELY COLD TRAFFIC using Collection Ads alone. Some key insights into getting Carousel ads to work: 1. Format is important. The type of creative you use and how it is formatted plays a big role in performance across the different platforms. With Instagram, we were restricted to 1:1 square 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC format collection ads, but on Facebook we found that the type of photography we use typically lends itself much better to vertical format (4:5) and this was generally reflected in the performance of collection ads on facebook when compared to square. 2. Intuition sometimes trumps purchase insights Collection ads give you the ability to curate the HERO products displayed within the ad. What you choose to display in these 3 or 4 spots will have a massive impact on CTR and potentially other metrics further down the funnel, so naturally it makes most sense to reserve these spaces for your bestsellers right? WRONG. We found through extensive testing that for us, high contrast products yielded much better front end metrics, had better relevance scores by 1-2 points and resulted in a much lower cost per ATC and higher ROAS. Take a look at the ads above - the ad on the left shows high contrast products below the hero against our best sellers on the right - which of the two ads draws your eye better? 3. Social proof and engagement is KING! One of the downsides to running the collection ad format is that it is not possible to share the POSTID between Ad Set for a specific ad. Well, we found a way to do this and we’re pretty sure nobody else knows about this little hack! We’ll be releasing a video on this soon! 4. Ad fatigue is real When scaling this aggressively you will need to have multiple winning creatives that you can rotate once performance starts to dip. Many marketers preach a creative burn approach which just isn’t scalable i.e run 1 single creative (perhaps with multiple dupes) until a point of diminishing returns. We prefer to keep performance as optimal as possible by rotating creative frequently as required. We aimed to have 8+ pieces of creative in any given scaling campaign with 3 active. As soon as performance dips a little or is showing downward momentum, simply rotate out for something else. Doing this allows for your creative to last much much longer - you can even pause ads that drop in performance and restart them again 2-3 weeks later as new people are targeted in your audience and old ads that may have become wallpaper, are forgotten. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC 7: UNLEASHING THE GT-CBO METHOD Facebook introduced Campaign Budget Optimisation late 2017, into 2018 and at first, it felt like a way for Facebook to take even more control of your spend but perhaps not to your benefit. Indeed it took us many months to be convinced this was worth using. However, the truth is, whilst CBO is a decent feature, it’s not the tool that counts but how you use it. What we discovered was: 1. CBO was not good for simply testing ads. We initially tested CBO as a way of replacing elements of our Graduation Testing techniques. But it wasn’t stable enough in sending spend into the right ads. We couldn’t align our objectives with what CBO was delivering. 2. CBO wasn’t a catch-all solution to drop multiple ad sets and ads expecting to scale up. Again it didn’t give us stability. 3. CBO was unpredictable without manual overrides, in our case, pausing bad ads and ad sets. So, if CBO was so volatile how were we able to scale CBO campaigns to $5-10K spend per day whilst delivering consistent results? And to do this in Q4 when CPMs were rising whilst maintaining high ROAS? 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC We figured out a winning formula. Here’s our approach, which has been tested across multiple stores and works every time: 1. Use Graduation Testing to find the winning ad sets and ads 2. Push those winners into Scaling campaigns to ensure the ‘graduation’ was successful aiming for 10+ sales with strong ROAS 3. Take the winning ad sets/ads and push them into a CBO campaign 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC This 3-step formula is the core of the GT-CBO Method. However, the devil is of course in the detail: 1. CBOs work best from our testing when ad sets are grouped - in the image above you can see we’ve grouped campaigns with similar size lookalikes (1%, 1-2% etc) and also pushed Interests and campaign specific ad sets (in this case Black Friday) into separate campaigns. More recently we’ve also pushed retargeting (HOT) campaigns into CBO with good success 2. We also found that using 1 day optimisation window gave us far better stability and consistency than 7d. Our guess is that since the budget is spread across ad sets, the 7-day look back to optimise for performance is not required as the conversions data is also held at Campaign level, not just Ad Set and so keeping the data ‘fresh’ counts for more. This has held true on AOVs from $20 up to $300 across multiple accounts 3. We implemented automated rules to cut bad performing ads, allowing Facebook to push budget into other ads - we would also add in new ads to ad sets that ended up with no ads running. We usually ran no more than 3 ads per ad set and a minimum of 5 and max of 10 ad sets with spends of $500+. It’s important to note budgets didn’t matter because our rules kicked out bad ads and let good ones run. 4. CBOs worked better with higher budgets, which makes sense since you’re splitting into multiple ad sets and multiple ads. By moving tested ad sets and ads into normal campaigns after Graduation Testing we’d see if we could scale them using traditional techniques first, then scale via CBO with higher budgets. You need enough budget to allow Facebook to push all your permutation of ad sets and ads into the auction - it will learn over time where best to push the spend. 5. In addition because the auction competition fluctuates daily this gives us the best of both lifetime budgets, which won’t spend if you’re not likely to get good performance, and normal scaling because we could pause out bad ads and funnel the spend into the best ad sets and ads. 6. The final tip is to go for Highest Value or Lowest Cost optimisation. Put simply, it does exactly what it says - to get you the best ROAS and/or lowest cost. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC And in case you’re wondering - there was no manual bid in sight whilst scaling as we used the GT-CBO Method to shoot right through Q4 to 8-figures. Why? How? We truly believe if you can line up a strong creative campaign, keep CPMs low, maintain a strong website conversion rate with fast-loading pages and high funnel conversion, Facebook will reward you with the best Users in the auction. If you keep the User happy, you keep Facebook happy. Manual-bid is a way of by-passing the auction constraints when your user experience (ads and sales funnel) are not good enough or if you feel your ‘offer’ (ad and landing page) are better than Facebook thinks it is and you want to override Facebook’s auto bidding to reach more people in your audience. It’s a good idea to try outbid competitors using manual-bid if you’re certain your ads are going to work - if not, you’ll simply end up burning through your budget. We’re big advocates of manual bidding and have used it multiple times to scale up significant spends and revenues since introduction around 2015. However, it is no longer our preferred or go-to scaling strategy when we have figured out a strong match between our ads and audiences together with favourable CPMs using the techniques mentioned here and of course the GT-CBO Method. Will we manual bid in future? Yes, when the time and place requires it. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC 8: 16X ROAS ON COLD TRAFFIC THROUGH BLACK FRIDAY If the amazing performance above wasn’t enough, how about a 1600% ROAS for Black Friday? That’s $16 back for every $1 we put into Facebook ads spend without even factoring in retargeting sales! Whilst we couldn’t predict how well the campaign would run, the success was by design. We did this in Q4 of 2017 as we did it each year before that. Not at this level of ROAS of course which requires many things to come together including low CPMs, a super slick sales funnel that converts highly and ads that cut through the noise. Oh and of course a product that creates DESIRE. To give us the best chance of success when it came to black Friday A LOT of testing and planning went into it. We mapped out a detailed plan, which included: our testing schedule, a killer lead gen campaign (more on that below) and pre-planned campaign structure. We cannot stress the impact this had on the success of Black Friday for this store. With experience comes planning for success and that’s exactly what we did. For our audiences we picked out Custom Audiences (based on segmented emails, video views, engagement with the Page, IG, posts etc) and Website Custom Audiences (based on 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC visits to pages in our funnel) extended them out as far as we could (180 days in most cases). We also created lookalikes of these from 1-10%, testing the smaller lookalike percentages and if they were profitable we then tested larger percentages because Facebook is far easier to scale with larger audiences. Our initial goal was to find out ahead of time what our hero promotional mechanic was going to be. For this we set up a series of A/B tests targeting existing customers using Facebook’s Split Test feature - we used existing customers as it removed the bias of whether they’d like the product or were interested in our vertical. We were interested in testing 3 different offers: A: Up to X% off sale section B. A special Black Friday exclusive bundle C: X% off a specific bestseller Our initial findings showed a much closer resemblance in performance between Offers A & C, with Offer C slightly edging it across the board. We were not entirely convinced with the outcome and waited a few days for delayed attribution to kick in. The subsequent results were quite different - Offer A had the lowest cost per ATC ($0.35), lowest CPA ($1.74), 100% more sales than Offer C and a staggering 87X return on ad spend! This is why it is important to give yourself as much time as possible to test. This is especially important for stores that have higher ticket products ($200 AOV in this case), where the consideration phase and thus attribution window is typically longer, which means delayed attribution plays an important factor on analysis and decision making. This together with creating campaign specific CBOs helped us scale fast on Black Friday and maintain that momentum. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC 9: THE THANKSGIVING 48X ROAS TRICK Our lead gen campaign generated a bombastic 48X ROAS on Thanksgiving Thursday whilst others waited until Black Friday to go big. Curious how we did it? We blended a key FOMO tactic with our past knowledge of purchasing habits around Black Friday: 1. Within apparel, selling out of your size during sales is the worst thing that could happen 2. GOOD products will always sell out quickly during Black Friday. We thus created hype around our Black Friday sale and gave customers and our retargeting list a chance to get access to the sale privately before the public launch.This essentially meant running a ‘below the line’ promotion to anyone on the email list before pushing the BF offers live to a prospecting audience on the Friday. This method can work for any event throughout the year such as Valentine’s or Easter. Here is what we did. 1. Publicised the upcoming Black Friday sale with a sign up link to access the sale 24 hours early 2. Got our influencers to build some hype around the event and post about the upcoming sale. 3. Launched several lead gen campaigns targeting a range of EXISTING, HOT and WARM audiences 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC 4. Our goal was to maximise potential reach. With such a small amount of time to create impact (We launched the Monday of Black Friday week), it was important to have all the placements covered (selecting All Placements). If we’d gone too soon we’d have lost engagement in the lead up to BF so timing was important 5. We optimised for impressions to ensure we had as many eyeballs on our activity as possible. This resulted in an overall ROAS from the campaign of 48X ROAS from an ad spend of about $5K dollars for lead gen resulting in $241K worth of revenue! Using Facebook ads for lead gen to pull cheap (quality) leads into your email sequence to close them works for Ecommerce and should be part of your marketing mix especially around promotions as it’s easier to grab the email based on a promotion, then do the DESIRE based selling via email to close them into a sale. Email here becomes the bridge between Awareness and Interest, and Desire and Action. 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC FACEBOOK’S EVOLVING - WILL YOU KEEP UP? As Facebook adapts to external factors the one constant to big success is focussing on a great User experience - because Facebook will always reward you for keeping their Users happy. This involves testing to find the right triggers for your audience and getting them from a passive state to creating desire which leads to action. Conquering both the art and the science of Facebook marketing is the core of a high-scale, profitable campaign like this. Managing fulfillment and logistics is one of the biggest challenges own label Ecommerce stores have, which makes dropshipping so much more attractive. But when you can own the brand experience from end to end and create products like no other, that’s when you’re able to create true blue ocean opportunity and stay ahead of the competition. Facebook does require tactical shifts every few months as the platform matures and adapts, however most of what we do is based on marketing principles first then platform strategies and tactics second. The biggest areas to focus on to win big with Facebook ads right now: - Lots of testing to nail down your ideal customer and breaking down their barriers to purchase using persuasive marketing techniques and well thought out creative and copy. - Better, meaningful Page engagement to attract lower CPMs. - Using a structured approach to testing and scaling audiences and ads to create repeatable, predictable success to keep feeding your scaling goals. - Ensuring your sales funnel is fast and slick because Facebook reward you for this with improved costs and reach. - Experimenting with which scaling and profitability levers work for you business because rarely does one-size fit all. - Above all, a product or service that actually solves a problem or enhances customers’ lives and figuring out how to get the message across to your prospects to create DESIRE whilst making it easy and informative to buy (and repurchase in future). 21X ROAS CASE STUDY PUBLISHED BY SMC Big thanks to Linus and his DOPE team out in Sweden including the unsung heroes in customer care, fulfillment and marketing - the years of hard work in brand and product discovery you guys put in enabled SMC to come in and do the easy part to scale up. And HUGE appreciation and thank you to the SMC team involved in landing this incredible performance: Dan (Strategist), Arnas (Media Buyer), Kate (Account Manager) and Ayah (Facebook Partner). About SMC SMC is a Marketing agency focussed on delivering client growth through the Facebook Ads platform. We believe in a balance between both Art and Science of advertising; being highly skilled technicians we blend traditional marketing with cut-through advertising campaigns to help 7-figure businesses generate higher, profitable revenues through Facebook, Instagram and other Facebook owned advertising platforms. The agency is headed up by CEO Depesh Mandalia who leads with his 15 years digital marketing experience having previously held positions as Chief Marketing Officer in VC backed startups. Depesh leads the team at SMC to help SMC’s clients deliver their genius to the world through Facebook advertising. Depesh also leads a thousands of entrepreneurs and marketers in his Facebook community, regularly consults for Facebook and speaks on global stages. His training courses and coaching programs have helped bring big success to students around the world. You can find out more or enquire about our services here: SMC: www.smcommerce.co.uk Depesh Mandalia: www.depeshmandalia.com For any questions related to this case study please ask in Depesh’s Facebook Ads group.