From Zero to $1M Create from Scratch a Timeless Skincare Brand
This is a case study from a Shopify Brand specializing in natural and organic beauty products for mature women. They provide a wide range of skincare and body care products that are made with natural and organic ingredients.
When Loretta got in touch for the first time with our founder, Andrea, she was on the verge of closing down her business.
Sales were very slow, profitability was poor, and overall there was not a clear vision of how such a brand could have become
a stable business over the long term.
We started working together in February 2020, and today we passed the $1M mark in revenue working together.
Here’s the approach we took to test out the most valuable options we had, eradicate what was not working, and double down on what worked well.
The first thing to define clearly was who to target, and what angles of communication to use to be sure that the brand would stand out.
In the beginning, the brand was getting some traction because of the appealing product description and the affordable pricing, but it was perceived as a generic skincare brand.
The conversion rate from the traffic was around 3.4%, not bad for sure, but not enough to break even with the tiny margins they were playing with.
After the initial market research and customer interviews, the decision was to pivot all the language used and content toward mature women, in order to tackle this portion of the market more strongly.
Being a bootstrapped company, it was important for us to keep in mind that all our marketing activities should have aimed to generate profit in the shortest period of time possible, while never going below the break-even point.
This was particularly tricky, as we were playing with pretty tiny margins on the first sales (the AOV was around A$ 55, and in order to break even we would have needed to keep the CAC below A$ 25.
We focused our testing and scaling efforts on the ads platforms of Meta and Google Ads.
While Google has been our powerhouse of Bottom Funnel conversions (with PMax / Shopping and Search campaigns bringing in Sales for less than A$10 on average), Meta was were our acquisition focus has been.
We decided to keep a simple campaign structure using CBO to be flexible with testing and optimizing creatives and audiences, mixing from time to time periods of stabilization (using AutoBid and differentiating the creative formats in the ads) and periods of hard scaling (helped by Manual Bidding to keep the CPA stable and focusing on the proven-to work creative assets.)
The main A/B tests we executed evolved around:
UGC vs Static Product Shots —> UGC Outperformed 80% of the times.
LAA Audiences VS Broad —> The right balance has been a budget split of 60-40 amongst the two categories, with occasional fluctuations.
Long Informative Copies vs Short Direct Response Copies —> The Short copies won most of the time.
In order to boost the LTV and fuel our growth machine, we needed to focus on retention marketing right from the beginning.
Klavyio is always our preferred platform to do this, and by setting up the following workflows and automation we managed to boost the early-stage LTV with 30% of the customers coming back before the first 90 days.
Our key goals have been:
Increase revenue from campaigns by segmenting the email lists ina a more structured way. In this way we would have optimized recipients, open rates, and click through rates.
Create better opt-in forms to increase acquisitions’ conversion rates from store traffic to list sign-ups.
Expand the customer journey through new behaviour-based automation.
Therefore, our main actions evolved around:
Enhancement of email designs, and the creation of graphic templates to be applied to our main emails.
Set up of LTV-Boosting flows such as Winback, Cross/Upsell, Thank You, and Post-Purchase.
Regular drip campaigns with an 80/20 focus on education/promotion.
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