Founded in 2009 by stylist-turned-fashion designer, Andrea Liberman, A.L.C.’s mission is to deliver effortlessly elevated wardrobe essentials that make women look and feel their best. As the core brand identity centered on ‘wear to work’, COVID-19’s shelter-in-place measures called into question a once proven paid social strategy that had been the largest contributor towards revenue and new customers. Last-click revenue was suffering as consumers were experiencing increased financial uncertainty and pulling back on discretionary spending.
A.L.C. needed to find new customers beyond the tried and true sophisticated working women, who comprised the brand’s base for years. Leading into the campaign site revenue was down 8% YoY, January Digital was tasked with bringing it back to even at an efficient return despite extremely conservative consumer spending in the apparel space. Typically, in a period of austerity, significant revenue increases are near impossible. Executing a dynamic approach while nimbly responding to evolving trends empowered our ability to capitalize on the initial successful metrics rendered from this strategic shift.
In response to the shifting consumer climate, January Digital (JD) saw the opportunity to adjust the A.L.C. social strategy against bottom-line business goals in order to reach a wider audience with limited marketing dollars. While expanding a target group would traditionally lead to a lower intent to purchase, January Digital’s unique approach proved Facebook’s conversion point was higher within the ‘add to cart’ customer set over those that had abandoned their cart.
As paid social had been the largest contributor of revenue and new customers for the brand, January Digital saw an immediate opportunity to improve the audience approach by adjusting the optimization strategy to widen audience composition and increase conversion efficacy points.
With a goal of adding incremental revenue to the business, January Digital implemented a single-variant testing strategy. Using the adjusted optimization point of add to cart vs. abandoned cart, we concluded that our original hypothesis was true: widening the point allowed for the algorithm to cast a wider net that would engage prospective customers with the maximum propensity to convert at greater scale and accuracy. January Digital reported back strong revenue increases using custom-tableau dashboards, which combine front-end Facebook metrics with back-end Google analytics, resulting in one source of truth that holistically evaluates performance to identify channel trends and the overall business.
The new campaign not only increased paid social traffic by 239% YoY, the halo effect of the increase of 20% new users on site leading to a 31% revenue increase, making Q3 one of their strongest in years, despite the ongoing pandemic.
While social channels are primarily utilized to generate awareness and drive new customer engagement, our evolved strategy enabled more advanced algorithms to optimize against ‘add to cart’ behavior and scale revenue, resulting in growth YoY and PoP.
Key success metrics to illustrate the campaign’s performance include:
Increased paid social traffic by 239% with last-click revenue growing 177% YoY
Increase of 20% new users on site YoY leading to 31% increase in site revenue YoY
The new social ‘Add to Cart’ strategy rooted in testing and adaptability continues to inform A.L.C.’s current and future campaigns.
