Recently I was fortunate enough to work with high end men’s clothing brand. Their business before they engaged us was primarily catalog and direct mail driven. Digital sales were primarily driven by a robust email marketing program.
The problem: While the email program converted extremely well, they weren’t able to acquire new customers this way.
They were somewhat skeptical that Facebook and Instagram ads were a fit for their brand. But with 2 billion daily active users, Facebook is pretty much a fit for any apparel brand!
The approach: We were fortunate in this case that they had a large customer list from their catalog efforts. Why is a nice customer list helpful to acquire *new* customers? Because you can create something called a Lookalike Audience on Facebook. This is an audience that Facebook creates of users who are *similar* to the customers on your list. Give Facebook enough seed data and they are remarkably accurate.
But, we went one better. We used a Lifetime Value Lookalike - this is based on a customer list that not only contains your customers, but also how much they have spent with you over their lifetime. In this case Facebook doesn’t just look for people similar to your customers, it looks for people similar to your *best* customers.
We began running ads on October 17, 2017. We immediately saw a significant revenue lift.
You can see that we generated $20,529 in revenue in the first 2 weeks, a 14.74 Return on Ad Spend.
What is particularly interesting is the average order value - sitewide for those 2 weeks it was $448. But for sales driven by Facebook ads it was $488! This is not a coincidence - this is the Lifetime Value Lookalike at work.
Those first 2 weeks set a big precedent to live up to. It’s not that hard to have 2 weeks stretches with amazing results, but could this be sustainable?
Well, our success continued all the way through the holidays…
Needles the say, the client was extremely happy with these results.
Our ads had more than just a revenue impact however…
You can see in this screenshot from Google Analytics that our ads also contributed to November being the highest trafficked month in Williams and Kent’s history! You can also clearly see the effect our ads had on traffic in general, an effect that continues as of this writing.
So we should only run Facebook ads during the holidays? Nope - thankfully Facebook and Instagram ads are an evergreen proposition. As with most retail the winter and spring won’t produce at quite the rate the holidays do, but we continued to achieve a robust 7.5x Return on ad spend through the first half of 2018, driving $275,464 of revenue against a $36,700 ad spend.
“Alex has done a great job for us on our Williams and Kent” account. He is very knowledgeable and professional in his approach”
Have an established fashion/apparel business ($10k+ sales/month) and want results like these? Book a call and let’s talk - Black Friday and the holiday season is just around the corner, now is the time to be getting a productive ad program in place!