Industry
Health & Personal Care
Services
Full Service Growth
The Brand
The Coola brand is the quintessential slice of California life and its products embody that ethos — from organic wellness to an outdoor, active lifestyle. Its skincare products are eco-conscious and sourced with a “farm to face” philosophy.
CTC caught Coola’s drift and set out to achieve its goal of protecting and improving skin, utilizing paid media to increase purchases of its organic sun-care products.
The Challenge
In the beauty industry, getting customers to your site doesn’t always come cheap. With CPMs for paid traffic higher than most, the difficulty is increasing visitors without breaking the bank.
Coola was no exception. As a brand that wasn’t digitally native, the hurdle was gaining traffic online, not just in-stores.
With a significantly high conversion rate, the opportunity was there.
The goal became getting qualified traffic to the site for a lower cost.
Alongside the obstacle of increasing visitors, was increasing AOV and LTV.
Before launching its paid media campaign, the CTC growth team conducted analysis and found that certain Coola products had higher AOV on Facebook (people would tend to bundle them with other products) at the top of the funnel.
As customers went down the funnel, they’d tend to buy more.
To capitalize on this meant finding ways to increase repeat purchase rate and the lifetime value of the customers that it was actually driving.
All that was left was to test it.
The Strategy
To combat high CPMs, it all came down to the creative and the angle of ad messaging.
For example, one of the top products for Coola is its “Sunless Tan” — but the challenge became adjusting the ad messaging angle during each season to produce creative that converts year-round.
In the winter, the focus was on keeping a bronze glow all year-round. In the summer, the messaging was about accentuating your current tan with the product.
To increase visitors, the team tested different creative variations for advertising.
The team tested creative variations — from still images to long-form makeup tutorials on YouTube. Through creative testing, they found a balance.
From a prospecting standpoint, long-form YouTube videos that showed people applying the product and illustrating its core benefits resulted in enticing content with a native-feel that led to engagement.
Then in remarketing, the team focused more on the actual product itself, with gifs and still-image product photography to further inform the consumer.
After identifying winning creative combinations by marketing campaign stage, the team then began hyper-targeting audiences. This strategy went against the grain of CTC’s typical buying methodology of targeting broad audiences, but it was because of one important caveat …
The Coola product catalog is diverse, from lip balm and sunscreen to aging serums and BB creams.
“Instead of our normal broad prospecting and remarketing, we built specific funnels around key products that demonstrated high AOV,” said Growth Strategist, Andy Reese.
“Whether it was the sunless tan collection or the aging serum — each diverse product had its own funnel from top-to-bottom, so we could hyper target those interested.”
By selling through individual product funnels, Coola offered customers the niche products they actually needed — making them more likely to convert — instead of putting them into a standard remarketing audience where they're getting ads for products they didn’t show interest in.
This became a layup for improving lifetime customer value. “We know that the replenish rate for the sunless tanner product is 60 days,” says Reese. “So anywhere from 45-60 days after they’ve purchased, to impact LTV, we’d target them with an ad to remind them to re-up on their product purchased.”
As a result of running recent-purchaser campaigns by product funnel, Coola’s repeat purchase rate increased by over 50%
It wasn’t just ecommerce that was reaping the benefits. Coola saw the results of Facebook advertising come through on other channels.
After running paid ads, there was a surge in in-store purchases of Coola products within retail locations at Ulta and Sephora. Digital strategy positively impacted the business holistically.
The Results
By selling through product funnels using Facebook advertising, Coola offered customers the niche products they actually needed. Conversions increased, followed by …
- 140% YoY growth
- +50% lift in repeat customers
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