68% Increase to First-Time Subscribers for OK! Beauty Box 22%
68% Increase to first-time subscribers
75% top line revenue growth
32% Reduction in new customer acquisition cost
16% Increase to ROAS
The Results:
68%
Increase to new customer acquistion
75%
Top line revenue growth
32%
Reduction to nCAC
16%
Increase to ROAS
The Goal
OK! Beauty Box are one of the UK’s leading beauty box subscriptions. They leverage the widely known ‘OK! Magazine’ brand as an anchor to provide luxury skincare & cosmetics to beauty lovers typically aged between 25-54.
After already running paid campaigns across Google & Meta, OK! approached us with the goal of acquiring more beauty box subscriptions at a lower cost.
It was our challenge to extract even more value out of the current campaigns and reduce overall CPA:
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Build & optimise Google Ads campaigns
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Build & optimise Meta Ads campaigns
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Reduce CPA for first-time subscribers
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Increase sales of limited-edition boxes
Goal Alignment and Research
With the scope of the project identified, the next step was to align myself with the goals of the project - which was to scale first-time subscribers at a profitable rate.
To do this, we had to agree on a north-star metric to guide all of our decisions in the ad accounts. The best metric for this had to be “new customer acquisition cost” (nCAC).
We used important business metrics like churn rate and lifetime value, and worked with the client to agree on a nCAC that was profitable.
Any campaign achieving this nCAC had free reign to scale.
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Every project I work on goes through my honed & refined ‘CCB’ research framework to determine our strategy and identify unique value propositions to leverage in our ads:
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Competitor Research:
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Review top 3 nearest competitors (Birchbox, Glossybox and LookFantastic)
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Investigate USPs, pricing, product benefits, positioning and more
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Review competitor ads on Spyfu
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Identify opportunity gaps and quicks win
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Customer Research:
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Build an Ideal Customer Persona (ICP)
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Leverage AI to scour Reddit, Quora and other forums for questions on skincare, beauty and cosmetics
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List key topics, buzzwords and pain points to inform ad copy
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Analyse OK! Beauty Box reviews and create a tally chart of what customers value most
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Review social media for behaviour signals and customer language
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Brand Research:
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Identify OK! Beauty Box USPs
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Feature vs Benefit analysis
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Customer profiling exercise and unique value proposition crafting
The Approach
Now that research was out of the way, it was time to implement our findings and move towards achieving the client’s goals.
Facebook Ads Account Structure
Our audit found that the Meta Ads account was suffering from an over-complicated account structure.
Audiences were fragmented across too many campaigns, with too little tests running for offers, angles and creatives.
And worse yet - we had several awareness and traffic campaigns live that were not aligned with the goal of the account (conversions).
We quickly implemented a concise account structure of just 2-3 campaigns and turned off any campaigns that did not have the sales objective.
Rapid Creative Testing
In the beauty industry, attention shifts quickly as new trends come in and out of fashion.
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And it’s no different with a beauty box subscription.
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With new boxes releasing every month, we had to ensure creatives were tested rapidly so that top-performers were identified early and scaled up to our budget targets.
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Images, videos, copy angles, headlines and audiences were tested on an ongoing basis with the very best ads being moved to high-spending campaigns such as Advantage+.
Google Ads and Automated Bidding
With over 12 months of historical data already on hand, there was a hefty amount of conversion data ready to take advantage of Google’s automated bidding strategies.
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We A/B tested broad match keywords and paired this with a conversion-value based bidding strategy like Target ROAS. The goal here was to lean into Google's smart bidding and align this with the broad match keyword strategy.
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This opened the door for Google to begin matching ads with users who showed an interest in beauty subscriptions or had buying intent for monthly beauty boxes.
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Combined with updated RSA ads, extensions, and campaign structures, our new strategy soon led to incremental beauty box subscribers at a lower CPA.
Google Shopping Feed Optimisation
At the heart of any good Shopping campaign is a well-optimised Google Shopping feed.
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We set to work on optimising products titles and descriptions to ensure visibility on high value keywords such as ‘monthly beauty boxes’ and ‘beauty box subscriptions’.
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Additional attributes were implemented to bulk up our feed such as GTINs, custom labels, sale price and product type. We also worked with the team at OK! Beauty Box to test new product images and prioritised those with the highest CTR.
“Cullen’s commitment to exceeding our goals and KPIs (and expectations) have really set him apart. He welcomes our input, offers candid advice, and has significantly improved our CPA’s, ROAS and Scaling capabilities. I wholeheartedly recommend Cullen to anyone seeking a proficient professional and a reliable partner in growth, scaling and overall success.”
- Thomas Smith, Reach PLC