Menu
After months of stock supply issues, hindering Bobux’s ability to meet performance targets, Bobux needed to close off the season strong with an End of Season sale.
We needed to close the gap and bring Bobux closer to their financial year revenue target. Selling through old stock to clear space for upcoming new season stock, whilst maintaining a profitable level of return, was paramount.
January is largely a slower period for eCommerce businesses, with consumers having exited peak shopping season. Bobux had also been dealing with significant stock delays, meaning there was a lot of remaining stock very late in the season. This needed to be cleared to make room for new stock arriving.
Bobux often has strong performance across their email channel during sale. This would help, but repeat purchases from existing customers, albeit cost effective, was not going to drive the volume of sales required to meet targets. Driving a high volume of new customers was key.
We had also seen a trend of customers purchasing more than one show during a sale, which was a great trend to continue to maximise average order value.
Make the most of CPM
As there is relatively less advertising in January, CPMs are relatively cheaper across the channels. This opened up the opportunity to go wider with our channel mix, introducing Display into our mix of Meta, Search, Shopping and YouTube.
Leveraging First-Party Data
We built audiences of those users whose first-time purchase was during a sale and created a lookalike of these users within Meta to drive new customers. This Lookalike audience was the stand-out performer.
Retention/New Customer Acquisition
In the months building up to the sale we ran Facebook lead gen ads to generate database sign ups for Bobux to tap into during the sale. Pre-Sale we also generated a high volume of cost-effective site traffic to bolster our remarketing audiences that could be leveraged during the sale.
Start Strong & Hold Course
From previous sales, we knew that there is a first-day peak, after which sales tend to slowly drop off until the sale ends. This meant we needed to start strong and scale spend to meet demand immediately, whilst maximising performance over the remainder of the sale with fresh creative & messaging to drive urgency. We ensured to brief in assets focused on the final days of the sale.
Contingency Plan
Plan for the worst and expect the best. We provisioned a contingency budget if performance was strong, meaning we could deploy this immediately without needing to go through additional approvals. Conversely, if performance wasn’t meeting expectations, we had plans in place to layer in additional offers such as free shipping to enhance the offer.
Bobux’s D2C channel is solely online, so digital was the hero channel to drive towards the businesses goals. We built a strategy across all layers of the funnel, understanding that if we weren’t driving enough volume at the top of the funnel, it would be impossible to meet revenue targets.
The core KPI was an overall revenue target. We also had ROAS targets across our middle & bottom of funnel channels. These targets were key in allowing us to identify opportunities to push spend harder to capitalise on strong performance. We set and agreed these in advance with the client to improve optimisation speed during the promotion period. For upper funnel channels, the main goal was driving efficient site traffic; if audiences and creatives weren’t hitting those benchmarks, we would pause, layer in additional assets or expand the audience size to get to an efficient level.
To hit the ground running across Search and Shopping and to account for learning periods, we gradually increased daily spend and bids the week prior to the sale. This also applied to our daily spend across our awareness channels. Across these channels we wanted to spend a good volume on day one as that was when the conversion rate was strongest, then based on performance, try and keep spend as consistent as possible.
Shopping Competition
Due to the sale being only on specific products, and the shopping channel being highly price sensitive and ultra competitive with other retailers selling the same products, we built a dynamic shopping campaign that only targeted products on sale. This meant we could bid more aggressively on this campaign, show these products more often in the shopping auction and be competitive at a price point against retailers. This quickly became our best-performing shopping campaign across all-regions, driving ROAS above the benchmark.
Final Days Urgency
Planning to hit the last day strong, we layered in the final days creative to drive urgency. Across search, we layered in countdown timers across the majority of campaigns, which counted down to the final minute of the sale. Throughout the Sale we also layered a Free-shipping creative variation that drove an extra incentive throughout the campaign period.
Higher Average Order Value
Based on the trend of users purchasing more than one shoe at a time, we needed to change our bid-strategies to focus on conversion value and users who are more likely to drive a higher conversion value. We opted for this over a CPA bid strategy.
Our creative showcased a wide range of products on sale, to encourage users to browse the full sale range, as opposed to assuming a small selection was on sale. The website experience also helped here, with the functionality enabling a user to filter by style, gender, size or stage.
Leveraging First Party Data
All of the new email sign-ups that we generated prior to the sale were included in all email comms for the promo.
Sitewide we achieved the target, generating 114% of target revenue.
Comparing the Sale period this year vs last year, we achieved a 47% increase in revenue YoY.
We achieved this through two core metrics:
Email performance significantly improved, generating 102% more revenue YoY. This is a 31% increase in conversion rate and a 35% increase in average order value from email purchasers (an average of 1.8 pairs of shoes per purchase).
37% of orders made during the sale were from new customers. This was a great result that signalled we drove a decent portion of new customers for Bobux during the sale, rather than simply sell to existing, highly engaged customers.
The success of this campaign made it the highest revenue month Bobux had seen since November 2020 and second highest online revenue month to date.
