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5 Growth Hacks We Used to Scale a Cosmetics Store From A$45K/Month to A$290K/Month

Before VN Consulting
After VN Consulting

With a bit of skill this is what you can do in under 8 months:

✔ How to grow a business by 126% in a year

✔ Improving the online store sessions by 60%

✔ Ways of doubling conversion rates from 1.54% to 2.87%

Here Is What You’re Going to Learn In This Case Study:

➜ The importance of localization and using the right channels

➜ How to retain a community and keep them engaged in the product

➜ Why you need to properly test ideas out before discarding them

➜ When to take risks to increase your revenue

Introduction

A trap marketers often fall into is assuming that because they can advertise to people in multiple countries at the click of a button their campaigns will work equally well across the world. This is not the case!

This case study is a continuation of a previous memo we produced, where we explored how our client – a hemp product manufacturer that operates in Australia – experienced difficulties when adjusting to the international market.

We will be covering various ideas and strategies that we used to grow the client from A$128K to A$240K in less than a year. Chiefly, there were five strategies that helped us achieve these results:

  • The Bundle. Just before starting with us, the brand implemented a product bundle where they packaged multiple items together, which increased their AOV by 36% and let them scale the business from A$45k to A$128k per month. This idea gave us a good head start.
  • Our Facebook Strategy. After we took them on, the client was already making around A$128k per month due to the implementation of the Bundle. There wasn’t huge room for improvement on the webpage, as they had a c.4.5% Clickthrough Rate (CR). However, implementing the right Ads Manager structure and having seamless creative testing resulted in almost doubling the company revenues for November in less than 30 days.
  • Community Management. The company began to create and manage VIP online groups, which helped them increase their retention rates. This initiative worked well and helped solidify the perception of our client being a reputable brand.
  • Creatives. Testing 4-5 stacks of creatives per week and allocating 20% of daily ad spend towards this end was a huge risk to a business after the main sale season has ended but it got us on a path to scale even more.
  • Growth Hacking Techniques / Omni Channel approach. Introduction of creative avatar and specific advertorials helped us to achieve our first 10k+ revenue in a few days, as well as the opportunity to try different markets, such as Europe. Additionally, the introduction of Google Ads with constant 5X returns helped achieve higher revenue numbers in total as more and more people searched for the brand.

In other words, Facebook found the best customers at the right time with the right product. It’s always worth remembering that trying to outsmart Facebook is a losing battle – they’re an almost trillion-dollar company solely built with the purpose of understanding their users to better sell products to them. So if you can’t beat them, join them, and take advantage of their skills.

Additionally, we also worked on the landing pages and found new ways of presenting the growing range of best-selling products. The main issue has been having enough in stock to keep up with demand.

How we scaled the business from A$45k to A$201k a month by implementing the right marketing strategy

We started working with this client in the middle of October 2020. However, they were already doing quite well by this point. In the first weeks of October, they had focused on arranging a bundle offer campaign that had created a major difference in revenues.

Prior to this offer, the products were individually sold. But this idea of bundling items together and selling them as a package increased their AOV by 36%.

It bears saying that some elements of their marketing efforts didn’t really need our help. The website had a CR of 4.5%, for instance. So we began looking for elements that we could improve.

To that end, we began implementing our remarketing structure, as well as our cold targeting strategy, both of which helped us to achieve an instant boost in revenues and a healthy ROAS of above 2.5+ shortly after!
With their bundle idea and our help, we managed to scale the business from A$45k to A$128k a month within a handful of weeks.

After this initial success, we began to diversify our marketing efforts. First, we started to test more creatives and started experimenting with new advertising angles. This led us to find two new winning ads that we made use of.

Besides, we began to experiment with advertorials and dark posts, as new potential sources of advertising.
Then we started eyeing other markets. Naturally, if you’re already doing business in Australia, it’s a no-brainer to do business in New Zealand. But our ambitions were greater, we wanted to conquer the “Big 4” – Australia, UK, US and Canada.

So we started to experiment with those new markets and committed to finding new audiences, which have proven to work to this day. This allowed us to scale from A$128k to A$201k in under a month by November.
Overall, we finished the period with high hopes of what the future might bring!

Conclusion

Overall, if we were to summarize the experience gathered from this client in a single phrase it would be “Try new things, you never know what might work.”

Starting with the product itself, it made us make some early assumptions that perhaps we would’ve been better off not having in the first place. Due to the stigma associated with hemp products, as they’re derived from marihuana, many people wrongly believe the products might be illegal.

Hence, we initially targeted young, trendy women. But over time we came to learn that a mature demographic was also willing to use these products if they’re framed with appropriate context. As such, if we had let our initial biases guide us, we would’ve not discovered new key consumer demographics.

Besides, it’s worth stressing that every region and demographic has their way of communicating. If you just assume the same messaging will work on everyone regardless of the market, then you’re doing your campaign a disservice.

If you want your marketing campaigns to be successful, sometimes it’s worth taking a bit of risk. This doesn’t mean that you have to act foolish, just that at times you have to be willing to lose a portion of your potential returns if you want to grow.

Always remember advertising is equal parts science, and art!