141% revenue growth for a luxury swimwear brand

“Our vision is to become a global brand known for its high quality trendy yet timeless designs. We were looking for a performance agency that would be able to help us scale and expand our business and BHL came highly recommended.”

Žiga, Brand founder

About the brand

*In this case study brand name will not be disclosed at the client’s request. We want to respect our customer’s wishes as well as make sure other brands don’t copy our ads. 😉

The brand is an online store for fashionably designed swimwear for women. Designed and produced in Slovenia, they’ve built a very successful business in foreign markets, specifically in the US.

Their founders, Žiga and Hana reached out to us before the summer, their peak of the season, to maximize the potential of the US market.

The challenge

The good thing about well-established brands is data. And the brand’s founders understood really well that their existing marketing strategy was underperforming. Selling swimwear is a very seasonable business, but at the same time, you know it’s time to change something in your marketing efforts when the sales results are constantly declining. 

“Biggest challenge with being a swimwear brand is seasonality. It takes a lot of hard work to develop a collection and you only get one shot to make it right as the season only lasts a few months.”

Žiga, Brand founder

In this case, we understood that different test approaches would take us months to get some proper results. Specifically for the US market. With a couple of weeks before the summer of 2022, we needed to really focus on the things that would help us get the best ROI.

As people were ordering their set of swimwear every day, we had to find ways how to find new customers. The number of returning buyers has increased by 154% which tells us that the customers are satisfied, proving that a good product will always attract returning customers. This allows us to spend less on returning customers and focus on the acquisition of new users.

The brand has invested a lot into its social media presence from the beginning. They’ve supported collaborations with some of the biggest worldwide influencers, which really helped establish their brand presence and provide them with some very quality content. This made all brand-related efforts, together with social media and content-building much easier. 

They organically built their followers on Instagram to 25k+ with multiple collaborations with big influencers. Some of them had between 500k and 1 million followers which helped introduce the professional and unique design of the swimwear to the US market. With all this content we were now able to really focus on the performance side of the store and utilize the content in our advertising efforts.

The process

Growing any e-commerce that is already dominant in the market means you have to take a new angle to your marketing efforts. Test new creatives. Find new channels. Optimize for specific devices. Here are the main activities from our process.

1. Taking over the accounts

Understanding where in the funnel we are leaving money on the table helped us prioritise our growth roadmap. Since the majority of the advertising budget was going into Google ads and the results of the optimizations are almost instant, we decided to start with Google ads.

Also, we noticed that there is room for improving the average order value on each transaction with some minor changes and that the overall conversion rate had the potential to be increased by up to 100% according to some research we did based on this industry.

Since the brand already had a history of advertising with our agencies, we wanted to do a thorough analysis of what was performing well and what could’ve been improved. We noticed that there were some technical anomalies with the pixel and event tracking and after fixing that, focused on analysing which creatives have performed the best so far. 

We also exported all email databases and segmented them based on their action. This way we got all purchases, initiate checkouts and several time buyers that we could import back into Facebook for lookalike audiences. 

A detailed research showed that the website conversion rates have room for improvement. We researched the competitors and the marketing landscape and did a document with suggestions that would later on improve the conversion rates.

An intro workshop helped us get aligned on the new creatives and ad copy that would be personalized to different target groups. 

The number of transactions have increased by 129% while the AOV and conversion rate have improved by 5% and 2% respectively.

2. Optimising the Facebook channel and scaling

Revieweing the old accounts helped us focus on two major things: 

1. Improving CTRs and creatives
2. Evolving the remarketing funnel

After taking care of the technical side of things like creating aggregated server side events to help Facebook collect more data after the iOS14 update we got in the creative sandbox and started working with all the content that was available to us on social media. 

We added a lot more video ads to our collection of banner ads and focused a lot more on copy improvements. We had approx. 30 new creatives to test before the first USD was invested into advertising and we knew we had to react fast to what the key KPIs like ad CTR’s, CPMs and CPC are telling us.

Also, Facebook catalog campaigns were necessary if we wanted to become better at prospecting and closing more deals on remarketing ads. 

While remarketing was already set up from before, we noticed an opportunity to expand it to a more detailed funnel, where potential customers get different messages in ads depending on the landing page that made them leave the website. That means that people that came to the product page and left got a different type of ad than people that left the website in the checkout.

And the results were rewarding our efforts. Within the first 3 months of our collaboration the revenue has increased by 141%, compared to the same period a year before in 2021. 

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“In comparison to other agencies we previously worked with, BHL is very professional, interactive and thorough. Knowledge, consistency and hard work is what sets them apart from anyone we ever worked with.”

Žiga, Brand founder

The results

Within the first 3 months of our collaboration the revenue has increased by 141%, compared to the same period a year before in 2021.

1. Within the first 3 months of our collaboration the revenue has increased by 141%, compared to the same period a year before in 2021. 
2. While MER (or ROAS) has been steadily rising from 3.5 to 4.5. 
3. The number of sessions has increased by 123%.
4. The number of transactions have increased by 129% while the AOV and conversion have improved by 5% and 2% respectively. 
5.  The number of returning buyers has increased by 154% which tells us that the customers are satisfied, proving that a good product will always attract returning customers. This allows us to spend less on returning customers and focus on acquisition of new users.