In 7 months from 0 to 1M € in monthly revenue
Our client is specialized in selling kid's home decor products and bedding items. They have a large product portfolio that contains more than 1.000 different products. Before the collaboration, the company was present in two smaller European markets where they have been already well-positioned, but couldn’t find a way to scale their business further.
CLIENT`S CHALLENGE: Scaling the business 👀
The client has reached out to us for help with their business plans and goals. At that time they were present in 2️⃣ countries but they were aware of their potential and capabilities to expand to more markets. We went straight to the business and prepared the strategy on how to scale while opening new markets.
How did we decide which markets to open? 🤔
Since the client was already present in the European markets we’ve decided that we will try to expand the business in other European countries. First of all, we did thorough research to determine which markets have the biggest potential. Below are a few parameters that we have examined:
👉 Client's capabilities and restrictions per market
👉 Demographics
👉 In-depth research of the (local) competitors
👉 Best marketing approaches for this industry
👉 Online demand
👉 Specifics of the target population for the specific country
👉 Customer journey
After the research, we defined several countries as our potential markets. The launch of the strategy was also prepared with defined specific tests to see if the client’s products were really a product fit.
In the first month, we expanded the business into five countries and later on in an additional two. 🏆 The goal was to test a bigger number of potential markets in order to find the ones that will enable us to scale the business in the future.
When you are opening new markets use localized assets and have customer support ready that will be able to help in the language that the targeted market is speaking. With a local approach, you can reach a wider audience and impact your target customers more. 🙌
For each market, we have also prepared the opening sale. This was the first advertising campaign used when we were opening a new market. The campaign was a success in every market 🏆, so we suggest you promote the newness of the product/service for its first time on the market. Communicate that loudly. People like new products and also like to hear about new ideas and innovations.
Our client had a big variety of products so we have decided to break them into categories. For each category, we defined our target audiences, and KPIs and started promoting them. The goal was to find a winning category and winning products inside those categories. 🏆
When we have found the winning categories and winning products, we set our sales strategy, which was mainly focused on bestselling products.
Bestselling products became the bait that attract customers to the site, but in the end, they also bought more than a few products.
The goal is to promote the bestsellers on the creatives and through them draw the customer to the landing page where they will be able to find those bestsellers next to the other products. This way you can sell even more and increase your AOV. 📈
After we have identified the main markets and main bestsellers, we started with the scaling phase.
The challenge we had was a big stock with plenty of different products, but at the same time, we were running out of stock for our bestselling products. Those products were driving the majority of the sales.
We rearranged the stock in a way that has enabled us to offer a big quantity of bestselling products but still keep smaller stock of other products to use for cross-selling and up-selling purposes. In this way, we have been able to raise the average order of each purchase. 🤝
Having products in stock also enables fast delivery of products sold. This is a crucial feature since nowadays it’s an important competitive advantage, to offer a superior purchase and post-purchase service. Providing fast delivery is one of the core parts of post-purchase services.
Our advice would be to plan in advance and always have products in stock. Don’t forget about plan B - what other products can you push, if something unpredicted happens and you run out of your best-selling products for some time. ☝️
It is important to analyze and use more marketing channels through which you can reach your customers.
In this case, we have used three channels:
👉 Meta as the main channel;
👉 Google where we have focused the most on Google shopping;
👉 E-mail marketing where we mostly worked on our retention strategy.
We have used Meta for the PUSH approach and we have created a demand by creatively advertising our products and pointing out the benefits of the products and the pains that products can solve. 🧠
On the other side, Google served well as a PULL channel. We were answering the existing demand and offering the right product at the right time when customers were searching for it🔍. Based on that we could also figure out which product is in high demand and in addition, also push it on Meta to find more similar customers that have the same needs, but did not know that yet.
E-mail 📧 was used mostly as the retention channel. After we acquired the new customers we have tried to increase the frequency of purchases by constantly reaching out with e-mails and notifying existing customers about new products, special offers, etc.
E-mail as a marketing channel requires far less financial input in comparison to Meta and Google advertising. Furthermore, e-mail marketing can generate significant revenue, improve overall profitability and enable you more budget that is needed for the acquisition of new customers.
In this case, the Meta platform has been the main channel for scaling and acquiring most of the revenue. Since things on Meta are changing fast and competition is tough, it is necessary to always try new approaches to be able to reach as many new customers 🛍️, as it’s possible. Down below you can find a few practical tips, that helped us to scale this client`s company. They can be also used by you to scale your business.
👉Ad approach
We have mentioned earlier that we have used best-selling products as the bait, but the same can be done with low-priced products. Take one product that you can offer for a really low price, put it on the creatives, showcase the low price and drive the traffic to the page where more products will be listed. Amongst the listed products there will also be the one with a really low price. Low prices will attract customers 1st, which will then lead to buying more products than just one. 😎
👉 Passion pages
The passion page is a Facebook page made to build a community that shares the same passion.
In our case for kids' home decor products, the passion page could be: “My kid`s dream house 🏠🧸”.
On that kind of Facebook page, the material shared is not connected to the business but is related to the topic. There you can share/post different kinds of material that don’t have a sales approach.
The advantage is, that you can use it for advertising purposes. Ads connected to the passion page, look more native which draws more attention and converts better.
👉DPA - Dynamic product ads
If you have a big variety of products, you have to use dynamic product ads. The Meta algorithm will try to adjust ads and show the right product (from your catalog of products) to the right customer. In our case, we have used a lot of dynamic product ads; and to keep them attractive, we have constantly used different ad copies, frames, and badges. Especially frames and badges can make them visually more appealing.
✨ Dynamic product ads (DPA) also allow you to generate product sets with specific products that you can choose on your own to target specific audiences.
For example, we have created specific product sets which contained all the products needed for the kid's rooms, another one only with products in pink🌸 color, etc. We used DPA within different ad types and in this way ensured, that Meta users would fall into a certain mood that we were aiming for.
SUM UP 🏆
We used all of the above-mentioned techniques to scale the business, but the far most important thing was - rapidly opening new markets. In the beginning, we focused on obtaining smaller shares of each market, instead, we should have focused only on one until we would have found the winners - markets with huge potential for the brand. After we realized that, we started to invest more energy in the markets with bigger potential, and at the same time, search for new market opportunities.
