How we scaled a female apparel eComm brand from?3L/month to ?1Crore+/month in just 12 months?

It took me a month to write this case study. This is for must read for you if:

• You are an ecomm brand owner stuck at a poor ROAS, and not able to scale ahead
• You don't have in-house creative development SOPs and structured
• You are not able to adapt to the rapidly changing market
• You are stuck with a 'Button Pushing Agency' still doing marketing of 2018 rather than 2024.

What all will this case study encompass?

• Exact creative strategies
• Hook ideation and extrapolation
• Ad account setup
• Manual bid scaling setup that took us to ?5Lakh per day

How it started?

‘Faisal we have been working with an agency since the last 15 months. Things are improving, but they aren’t bad either. They are just stagnant. Some months we do ?5 Lakh some months less than that. We want to work with you, but it is a risky move at our end’

This was the convo I had with the founder when I chatted with him on 15th March 2023.?

It was a risk

It could make of break their business

It was….15 months too late

‘Give me 45 to 50 days. If we can't move the account by an inch…I will be transparent and upfront with you. Let my team try a shot.’?

I replied.

And so we started off our engagement in Week 1 of April

By mid of April we started seeing consistent daily ?30kish revenue. (The founder now tells me that itself got them excited)

On 27th May, the brand hit its first ?1 Lakh days for the next 4 days consistently?

And this, I counted, was under 45 to 50 days

PHASE 1: SURVIVAL ROAS ACHIEVEMENT & FOUNDATION RE-BUILDING

When a business comes to you with a bleeding ledger, you have to be very careful with spend allocation.?

We focused on these four things in this phase. The first three are the MOST underestimated impact drivers by most D2C founders

1. )Creative stack expansion:

The ad creative is the first interaction of a prospect with the brand in the purchase journey.?

The methodology to create killer creatives is simple. No need to reinvent the wheel

• Closely and scientifically what other brands doing
• Understand the different formats of advertising angles that exist ( Irrespective of niche)
• Figure out how your product can be integrated in said formats ( Many have existed for ages)
• Start with creating these newly optimized ads for best selling/validated collections
• Make sure you create both, Feed & Reel optimized ads
• Test out multiple hooks on same video concepts to figure out what works better
• Read data and create a creative SOP for future expansion.?

2. )CRO stack optimization:

A stable and profitable media buying result is ONLY possible with an excellent user experience & journey.?

As soon as we onboarded, we let the past 15 months of data tell us a story. Customers were showing super interest in the products (Very less View Content costs) however the AddToCart stage was where the drop happened. Customers were visibly getting confused with the product page and offers.?

We kept on doing competitive analyses of PDP, Collection & Home Page to optimize the product pages better. From the first month itself the effects of our insights were visible with the CVR%age increasing by 40%& ATC%age by 14%

3.)Offer Hacking:

Customers buy offers. There is no denying that. Now how you play over this basic human psychology is where good brands win over imitators.

One disclaimer though, Offer IS NOT discounts. Don’t interchange the two. The way to offer hack is simple. Just like creatives, don’t reinvent the wheel, just borrow ideas from brands of the last 2 centuries

• Observe the offers being run. The language, packaging & implementation of the same
• Test the same with your best selling/validated collections?
• Being agile about offer success - if it doesn’t work, switch ASAP
• Being a bit out of the box regarding offer packaging. The offer’s job is to excite a prospect that they jump into the funnel.
• Don’t fall for the adage - ‘Don’t want everyone to think we are always having offers’. Your branding don’t go stale….your marketing & offers do.?

This client ran the same offer for 1 month 20 days. In that time the sales went up by 174%, without the AOV budging at all.

4.)Ad account structure:

There is a reason that Ad account is at the bottom of the priority list here. It is because only 20% of the marketing happens here. Rest all happens outside the ad account. But the disproportionate attention ads manager strategies gets is almost laughable.?

The Ads manager structure is important however to ensure the right audience setup is being done thru and thru. People over complicate this a lot. You don’t need a lot of campaigns to ramp things up. You just need a few top of the funnel ones and a simple consolidated?

This is a super consolidated set up, just focused on creative testings, social engagement testing, catalogue testing and a consolidated retargeting?

Lesser the campaigns, more the clarity & more consolidated the learnings. This account setup is ample for spends under ?7L/month.

By the end of the May, the brand had touched it’s first 1L+ days consistently. This gave us the confidence on the structure, the PMF & the prior untapped potential of the brand.

PHASE 2: STABILIZATION, OPTIMIZATION, RETENTION & TESTING FOR FUTURE SCALING

The above strategies can take you only so far. The next four months with the brand were good. We hit a consistent ?20L+ mark in the coming months and kept it that way with a stable enough ROAS.?

One foot on the present (building ROAS) one foot into the future (testing new creative concepts based on past hits to create more future scaling opportunities)?

In this time the brand also started up with retention marketing with our partners, setting up the bottom of the funnel flows to ensure customer acquisition remains stable & as profitable as possible.

Around this time, the biggest mistake most founders make is….they chill out.

Always remember that the results from ads are just a temporary high. This isn’t the time to relax. And this is what the client recognised instantly and got onto work on:

• Future offers
• Future launches and coordinating with their suppliers for the same
• CRO with our partners
• Ramping up the creatives needed as our team’s direction?
• Investing into other aspects of customer acquisitions, retention being just one of them
• Reading the data objectively enough to understand customer behaviour and taking calls to optimize purchase journey

Our job, at this time, was to ensure plentiful cash flow to allow this expansion to be fruitful, while remaining bootstrapped. Scaling is a team sport.?

Now here is the account structure for this phase of ad account scaling

• Creative testing on top of the funnel - getting about 25% of the ad spend. Goal is to get a minimum of breakeven platform ROAS.
• Core campaign, whatever has worked in Creative testing, deploy on ABO with?
• ASC campaign, with the best performing assets from? Creative testing on top of funnel - getting about 5% of total spends. Keep an eye on drop in audience quality and RTOs/Cancellations when going with ASC. Only deploy with proven assets
• Catalogue testing on top of funnel - getting between 8 to 10% of ad spends
• Retention funnel on every part of the funnel, with a welcome, abandon cart and post purchase sequence.

1.) CONCEPT SCALING THROUGH CREATIVE EXTRAPOLATION:

In this time period we set up the methodology of hook testing & future hook extrapolation with the brand. Our team tested out multiple creative formats and hooks, based off which we ideated on future hooks.

Never think from scratch….pick up what has worked and make something new out of it

As an example here, after a ton of testing our team saw a specific hook angle? “Nothing but <Brands Name>” work very well. This got us to create more video ads around this specific angle til we juiced it out. In just four months almost ?7Lakh was spent on this concept alone. That is 25% of the total ad spend, on just one super scalable hook angle.

Around this time period we also tested out offers.?

What nature of offers work for the brand. You can’t just assume an offer to work. Your audience must also find it valuable enough to begin with.

So we tested out the following offers angles

• Non festive time period + flat 50% off sitewide with a flat 50% off, tanked with low ROAS
• Raksha Bandhan related sales with a flat 25% off, worked with decent ROAS

In both of the above concepts, we ran multiple creative variations based on our consecutive learnings on creative testing campaigns to figure out what hooks and formats might work better with offers.

After so much testing, the final conclusion was:

• GIFs with Offers during festive time
• Easy to convey strong offer statement, nothing complex that confuses customers

This made us ready for OND2023

PHASE 3: SCALE - SUSTAIN - SCALE

The goal by end of the year was - ‘To hit 2Crore total revenue since in the FY2023’

That meant a minimum of ?33Lakh consistently for the next 3 months.

We ended up hitting this number 20 days ahead of schedule on 9 December itself.?

The last 3 months of 2023 was a culmination of the testing and experimentation of the rest of the year.?

As I was writing this case study, I wanted to, actively, make it sound more complex than what it actually was. But truth be told, just a simple ad account structure, good creatives and offer, retention marketing at bottom funnel…that’s all

1.) October ‘s Scaling Ad account structure before November hits us.?

Here are the stats for the month

• Ad Spends: ?7.8 Lakh
• Revenue: ?30.19 Lakh
• Attributed ROAS: 3.43x B
• ROAS: 3.9x

• Creative testing at ABO. Largely broad audiences with multiple hook testings. This goes on as usual with a 30% budget allocation. Most of the testings were done on broad OR some validated audiences from past 6 months
• New Offer testing. We set up our proprietary full funnel conversion campaign for parallel offers. Here we ran a super solid offer, Flat 50% off by the name of ‘Half Price Store’. The campaign consisted of 3 to 4 top performing TOF audiences with the Offer creative along with BOF+MOF audiences in a single adset. The aim was to test IF the offer works, if it doesn’t, shut and shift to other offer options we had conjured up, and if it does, run it for next two weeks and merge it with Diwali, followed by BlackFriday.?
• Core campaigns for best selling collections. Based on the creative testing, we infuse the validated creatives to our proprietary Core campaign structure, which has best performing audiences at 3.5x to 5x the expected CPA

2.) November’s Festive Offer Scaling

Here are the stats for the month

• Ad Spends: ?11.95 Lakh
• Revenue: ?53.14 Lakh
• Attributed ROAS: 4.06x
• BROAS: 4.5x

• The above mentioned Core campaign setup along with the 50% Flat off offer started to work wonders. Core campaigns along with our Full Funnel It accounted for 60% of the spends now at an average attributed ROAS of 4x+
• As the month went by the branding of the offer kept changing. From Half Price store, it went to Diwali Sale, then Black Friday…into December. If it isn’t broke then don’t fix it!
• During this time the brand launched Coord sets, which we tested in the creative testing campaigns extensively, prepping it up for the December month.

I had the good fortune of visiting their office in November, and everywhere we looked all we saw were bundles of clothes from the orders we were generating.?

We just took the daily spends towards the ?50K/day mark while maintaining a daily ?2.5 Lakh revenue rate. The whole team celebrated a super successful Black Friday. The client sent our whole team these tasty sweets to celebrate with them.

Though it already looked too good to be true. Little did we know how crazy it was about to get in December.

3.) December got CRAZY

Here are the stats for the month

• Ad Spends: ?19.6Lakh
• Revenue: ?86.82 Lakh
• Attributed ROAS: 4.11x
• BROAS: 4.5x

All through December I kept reminding myself…this is the same brand that was at ?3Lakh/month in April.

We were doing ?3Lakh/day in the first week of the month.

December 9th was the brand’s 2nd year anniversary. We somehow managed to hit our ?2Crores target on that very day. The mood couldn’t have been more celebratory. But there was more in store.

Our team took them from ?2.5Lakh/day to ?5lakh/ day in the next few days.?

We launched a Cost Cap campaign at multiple bids, using our proprietary bid calculation methodology. Tested and adjusted them up for a few days and BAM…the account reached a daily revenue of ?4.5Lakh/day to ?5Lakh/day

From a top view though all looked great, but due to such an exponential growth curve, the backend started to take a hit. By the end of 3rd week of December, we took a call to turn off the cost caps and scale back to ?2.5lakh/day. Else the brand would have easily crossed the ?1Crore mark.?But nonetheless, an enviable scale to reach up to.?

EXACT HOOK STRUCTURES USED FOR CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT

A lot of hooks and video flows were tested out over the past 9 months with this brand. However, these were the top 6 ones which made the biggest impact and generated the highest sales numbers in terms of ROAS and volumes

Apart from these, based on our research, in the apparel niche the following concepts work wonders as well.

GOING INTO 2024. :

The goal of the new year was to hit the ?1Crore mark by March ( accounting for changing seasonality in the midst of it)

The same concepts as described above were put into place and the result was a glorious ?2Crore+ quarter, ending with. 1Crore + month in March 2024

The founders and our team couldn't be anymore ecstatic.

Overall the brand ended up with ?4.6Crore of revenue generated in this Financial year!

IN CONCLUSION:

This case study has been in the making for a month. I used to gather up and document tidbits from my ads dashboard and attempt to structure the whole approach as clearly as possible.

Growing this specific brand has been one of the best learning experiences of my career. A zero to hero and eComm story in the making in its truest form.

If anything I were to highlight in this case study, it would be the creative led approach rather than any 'Facebook Ads Magic'. Creative is the true differentiator & your primary focus as a marketer. Everything else is secondary.