Stitch People is an ecommerce business that offers modern and fun cross-stitching resources. Their popular DIY cross-stitch book is a comprehensive guide to designing and stitching your own cross-stitch characters! It has hundreds of different pattern elements to help you get the perfect look for your family and friends. In addition to that, they offer patterns for things like weddings, occupations and hobbies, backgrounds, farm animals, armed forces, sports, and more!
Prior to bringing Tintle Digital Marketing on board to fully manage their ad campaign, they were running FB ads in-house. While this was working well enough for them, they didn’t feel like they were properly optimizing the ads or doing all that they could do with their FB advertising campaign. In addition to that, they had done some A/B testing prior to TDM taking over, but didn’t do enough. They reached a point where they clearly realized the need to hand the campaign over to an expert team in order to help fine tune their ad campaign, and greatly improve their results.
The Problem
Stitch People found themselves in the same dilemma as most business owners. That is, they were simply spending too much time working on their FB ads themselves. The co-owner found himself wearing many different hats and needed to scale back where he could to focus on what he does best. They wanted their ecommerce business to continue to grow and reach new levels of profitability, but running a FB ad campaign successfully takes a lot of time and effort. They were eager to pass the campaign over to a team of seasoned experts to find even more success and a better ROAS.
The Solution: Create New Graphics, Videos and Revised Copy
When Stitch People decided to hand over the reins for their FB/IG ad campaign to Tintle Digital Marketing, they quickly realized ALL of the areas they were leaving money on the table by running the ads in-house and how much room for growth they had!
One of the first orders of business was creating fresh and compelling new graphics. This was easy for us to do, because they already had a huge library of professional visual material and strong brand guidelines working in their favor. In addition to static ads, we also created new explainer videos, flashing videos, and animated videos.
Additionally, we updated their ads with new copy and some copy tweaks. Sometimes the most subtle changes can make a HUGE difference in ad performance. They had a great foundation built, but needed a professional team to go through their existing ad copy and update and improve upon their foundation. In addition to revising the graphics and the copy, we also needed to complete much more A/B testing to effectively test many more ad variations with the new copy, graphics, audiences, optimizations, etc.
The Solution: Offer Compelling Promo And Further Test ATC Optimization
Stitch People wasn’t quite ready to discount their product or offer a promo right away, since they told their loyal and large audience that they never did that unless it was a new release. BUT, because of the unique circumstances with the pandemic and the amount of time more and more cross-stitchers were spending at home, they decided to take our suggestion to run a $10 off promo. This greatly helped improve their results overall! In fact, we saw a 200% increase in ROAS from this promotion alone.
Don’t underestimate the power of a good promo. Most of the time, promotions that are at least 15% off can be a game changer for bringing in new customers. This is because first-time customers in particular are always the most difficult and expensive to convert for any business. The top of funnel should offer and specifically highlight an exciting enough promotion that will lower the barrier to entry for new customers. After someone makes a first purchase, additional sales down the line are much easier because trust has been established; past customers don’t really need as much of an incentive as brand new customers do. While it may seem small, this is something that is very important to work into your advertising campaign and makes a world of difference.
As previously mentioned, we completed much more in depth A/B testing to find the sweet spot for this campaign. Through our extensive testing, we discovered that optimizing for add to cart for cold audiences brought in a lower cost per add to cart, high link CTR, and bonus purchases. In other words, this highly efficient strategy brought in more traffic, more engaged site users, and new customers immediately. We focused on this profitable optimization so that we could also retarget these audiences afterwards to produce nearly a 7 ROAS overall for the sale.Again, this method works very well to get cheap add to carts, bonus purchases from the add to cart optimization and then, most importantly, provides a huge boost to the ROAS with retargeting.
The Solution: Focus On Social Proof To Boost Performance
High engagement on an ad will almost always perform better than an ad with zero or almost no engagement. High engagement simply means the ad has many likes, reactions, shares and comments, aka social proof. When someone sees an ad with this high engagement, they’re seeing that other people liked or commented on the ad which helps with conversion overall. We ran engagement optimization on an ad to boost performance for Stitch People and got 5.3k in reactions, 356 comments, and 1.1k shares. 😱
Wow! What's great is that the longer we run this ad, the more successful it will be, primarily due to the visible high number of people who are engaging with the ad. High engagement like this immediately validates the business and product and encourages MORE viewers to click on to the site. This social proof really helped legitimize their product -- we got many sales from this ad but it mainly was an initial introduction before we retargeted the audience to purchase.
We turned $15,457.11 of ad spend into $102,380.20 in revenue over 2.5 months, again DURING the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s not all, we also brought in purchases at just $4.74 on average, and the campaign achieved a 6.62 ROAS overall. This is a HUGE win for Stitch People! Many ecommerce businesses are thrilled to see a 3 ROAS, but having a ROAS of 6.62 is FANTASTIC!
In Conclusion: Get MORE New Customer Purchases With A Solid Promo
In addition to the $10 off promo we discussed above, we also tested a freebie pattern offer for new customers, which was inspired by the pandemic. This was a BIG boost to their top of funnel (cold customer acquisition). From the freebie pattern ads alone, we brought in:
Remember, all of these wonderful results were just from one freebie cross-stitch pattern. After that, we were able to retarget those new leads again to produce a high 8.98 ROAS!
Ecommerce biz owners listen up: If you can offer a good promotion, it has the potential to transform your campaign and increase ROAS significantly. Giving is always a good idea, especially for new customers. The freebie cross- stitch pattern path also led to a larger email list, new customers, AND a new warmed-up audience to sell to again in the future. Win-win!
Making sure you have a SOLID intro offer is imperative to find success with Facebook advertising. In Stitch People’s case, they had their very popular DIY book, which is awesome and sells very well on its own without a promo. However, when we added in a discount code during the pandemic and ran a freebie pattern for new customers, it increased the amount Stitch People was making from their ads in a very significant way. Sometimes it just takes some small but profound tweaks to a funnel that makes all of the difference!
Are you spending too much time on your own running ads in house when you could spend it working on things in the business better suited for your attention? Do you dream of handing your FB marketing off to an expert team that can take you to the next level and increase your ROAS so you’re bringing home even more profit?
Have you ever had your Facebook ad account analyzed by an expert to see what's working, what's not and to advise you on the BEST next steps to take in order to optimize your campaign?
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