Scaling Ad Spend During Pandemic With Shopify

Heres how we helped a Pet bed Shopify store scaling to $251,557 while increasing website conversion rate to 4.25% ?

Brand Story

The brand was launched in 2009. It was created and based around the key principles of offering high quality and fashionable pet products that are affordable to every pet parent. Pet wellbeing is the company’s key consideration when developing its products. The brand manufactures and sells America’s number one best-selling pet bed.

They are now selling very successfully on Amazon, but when we were getting started with their Shopify store, there was a lot of work to be done.

Goals

One of the main goals was to achieve stable revenue growth from their Shopify store.

Also, in the COVID crisis period, they wanted to minimize business impact, while also maintaining and/or increasing ROAS and scale.

Challenges

The website conversion rate was very low.

Also, they were struggling to find a viable social media prospecting strategy to break through the massive competition on Facebook ads in the pet space.

As with most companies, the brand was also expecting to be strongly affected by the recent COVID-19 outbreak.

The company experienced a clear slowdown in February and March. As the lockdown started in that period, getting the best sellers in stock was a serious challenge.

We had to come up with a solution to bring results back on track and capitalize, if possible, on cheaper PPC traffic/conversions.

Results

ROAS increase: + 250%

Conversion Rate increased to: 4.25%

Total revenue increased in 3 months: 524% (to $251,557)

Facebook Ads Strategy

The area from which the products were due to be shipped had been put under lockdown. However, after receiving confirmation that we could still operate and the order could still be delivered, we started implementing some new campaigns.

Firstly, we set up a sales campaign – mostly for products that were on clearance. That way, the brand got rid of excess inventory without losing profits.

In addition to that, since we were not promoting any promo codes before, we started a retargeting campaign with a small ‘10% off’ discount code. It generated over 7 times higher ROAS in this month alone.

A really successful campaign was also to leverage on news coverage. In one particular morning show, there was a segment where a few pet accessory products and brands were showcased advertising their best-selling pet bed. We were able to extract almost 3 minutes of content from this coverage, and it is still to this day one of our best performing creatives. This kind of social proof can really boost trust in a brand, especially in a market where there’s a lot of competition – and many low-quality fakes.

Another successful campaign was for Easter;one of their products,a pet bed with bunny ears, was a huge hit, and the ROAS definitely propelled this campaign into the top 5 best performers.

Our main campaigns are based on creatives that are showcasing the product, both in a professional set-up and also when it is in use by the pets. We see massive social engagement (without optimizing for it) from past consumers who want to show off their pet and how much they enjoy the products.

Conversion Rate Optimization Step-by-step

Salesgenomics has been working on continually improving the site with Conversion Rate Optimization for a long-term engagement with the brand.

The site’s conversion rate in the first month of the engagement was 0.54%. In April (the most recent full month), we achieved a conversion rate of over 4.25% (with record revenue from the website) – which is around 8 times higher than at the beginning.

Revenue grew to 50 times higher in the last three months compared to the initial three months, as the strong conversion rate allowed for the rapid scaling of paid and non-paid channels.

The brand already had significant Amazon and wholesale channels when launching their own Shopify site. However, the Shopify site was initially developed by a boutique agency that, despite an attractive and functional design, did not apply best practices for conversion rate optimization.

Phase One: Theme Upgrade and Custom Development

Our priority was to ensure that the site was running on the latest major theme version. The website was constructed on an outdated version, and we wanted to develop the site on the latest code base to take advantage of bug fixes and the latest features.

Theme updates can be a complicated task, especially with code customizations. But still, it is worth keeping up with the major theme versions (remembering though to wait a few weeks for the inevitable initial minor bugs to be fixed!). Also, be prepared to review the theme and test it thoroughly, as not all changes are positive for conversion.

Additionally, we worked with a developer to create a cross-product linkage. The goal was to help customers find closely-related products where the built-in Shopify option selectors were insufficient.

These changes gave us a great base for further improvements.

Phase Two: Navigation and Homepage

The second step was to apply discoveries from heuristics reviews across the site.

Navigation:

The main navigation menu was changed to be much more conversion-focused.

The default theme menu included generic links like ‘Home’, ‘Shop’, ‘Contact’ and ‘About’, which do not lead directly into the sales funnel (We dropped Home and Shop and moved Contact and About to the footer).

Since we saw two major groups of visitors to the site (dog and cat owners), who potentially had different needs and preferences, we split the navigation to support a dedicated collection for each of them. ‘Shop Dogs’ and ‘Shop Cats’ became the first two major navigation links.

This enabled us to create dedicated collections with products categorised according to the pet type. Additionally, it helped with narrowing SEO keywords to appropriate pet-specific terms and the relevance of paid search ads.

Homepage:

We moved from a multi-image slider to a shallower single static image featuring a best-selling product line and a strong call-to-action, which led straight to the best-selling product. Conversion studies show that this option is generally more effective at drawing customers into the purchase funnel than sliders (which cause visitors to pause to watch them and forget to continue shopping!).

Below the new static hero header image, we also featured the top three collections above-the-fold to direct customers to the product ranges of interest more easily.

Phase 3: Product and Cart Page

We made copy improvements to clearly convey easily-scannable key features of best-selling products. We also introduced a tabbed description area for easy access to the Shipping and Refunds information.

Additionally, we optimized the Reviews area. We sorted them to show photo reviews first, as they are considered more credible by visitors. Next, we integrated the reviews rating and count with product titles in product and collection pages. We connected the reviews app with Amazon to import and supplement the direct reviews on the site.

Throughout the website, we created the key call-to-action buttons in a stand-out color to ensure the desired path for visitors was immediately clear.

Phase 4: Post-Purchase Upsells and Pre-orders

Having updated the site and seeing that the conversion rate increased over 400% during the first phases, we then focussed on adding key apps. We wanted to increase Average Order Value and support intermittent out-of-stock delays.

We introduced post-purchase one-click upsells to all major products, offering a second item with generous discount and appropriate accessories. This added purely incremental revenue of over $20k in less than three months, with no interruption to the initial purchase (as can happen with pre-checkout upsells).

Separately, we added and configured a pre-orders app to cover temporary stock-outs. With Coronavirus-related shipping delays, it allowed a continuation of sales momentum of bestsellers pending large deliveries. So far, in 2020, this has accounted for over 15% of sales, which otherwise might have been lost to stock-outs.

Phase 5: Loading Speed and Ongoing Testing and Optimization

We continue to work on the site to make improvements, but with the previously mentioned major changes in place, the focus is more on data analysis and technical ‘under-the-hood’ improvements.

We optimized site images to reduce their file sizes by over 30% on average, boosting loading speeds. We set some non-essential scripts to load ‘async’, meaning the page load was not dependent on them. It allows them to load in parallel and not delay the page load. We’re continuing to identify page speed loading improvements, including analyzing key page sections for which the data shows low levels of interaction or impressions – and so could potentially be removed.

The work continues. With many of the above-mentioned key improvements in place, we move to a testing-based approach. We want to identify incremental improvements that will further support the growth in revenue from the site.

Results

We scaled the campaigns from spending $6,000 per month to profitably spending over $7,300 per month while increasing the ROAS by 250%, going from 1.95x to 4.36x;

The client started to get more and more brand recognition in their main market (USA);

Even throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, we have been able to generate positive results without reducing the ad spend.