Criquet Shirts came to the MuteSix team looking for new ways to scale and optimize their media dollars on Facebook.The men’s clothing company based in Austin, Texas, proved to be a market fit, already maintaining a healthy ROI, but looking for stable growth.
So instead of fighting for shelf space they wanted to expand their Facebook strategy to see growth in disruptive ways.
You may already know Criquet Shirts for their vintage inspired golf shirts, Luke Wilson partnership or humorous ads such as this one (created in house).
The time from October to the end of the year is not only the biggest spending period for US shoppers, but also one of the most competitive for e-commerce businesses.
What often happens during this time is advertisers start to push budget in preparation of Black Friday, but this means the costs heavily increase, all the way through Christmas.
In October and November of 2018, we generated an average ROAS of 3.63X with a $43 CPA.
To achieve this (more than once), we dug deep into customer data to find untapped lookalike segments, optimized retargeting windows to squeeze out maximum ROAS, and pivoted creative to bust consumer objections.
Here’s how we did it.
Improve Acquisition with Strongest Lookalike Audiences
When the primary objective is to find new ways to scale and maintain stable growth, the majority of ad spend is focused on acquisition or otherwise known as the top of the funnel.
One of the best ways to focus on scale is through the use of lookalike audiences.
If you’re already running profitable Facebook ads, then you’re familiar with lookalike audiences. It’s one of the best ways to find new customers on Facebook –hands down.
That’s why we built lookalikes off of the strongest audiences available, which are:
1. Customers Who Have Purchased Last Year During This Time Period
We created a lookalike audience off of customers who purchased during this same period last year to help us find customers who share the same holiday and gift-giving shopping habits. This turned out to be our best performing lookalike audience.
This is also an audience we’ve used multiple times throughout the different seasons and has proven effective time and again.
2. High Lifetime Value (LTV) Customers
All customers aren’t created equal, and in most cases you’ll find that 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. That’s why we built a lookalike audience of customers who spent at least $300.
Because Criquet Shirts was already receiving a healthy number of daily sales, we had a big enough pool of customers to let Facebook do the job of finding new similar customers.
If you don’t have a large customer list or purchase audience, it will be harder to use this method.
3. Purchasers From Last 180 Days
Most people will have this one in place already; a lookalike audience of customers who purchased in the last 180 days.
This was our third best-performing lookalike audience.
Other lookalikes included visitors who added to cart but did not purchase and the top 5% of website visitors, but our most successful lookalike audiences were the three mentioned earlier.
Reach a Larger Target Market by Attracting New Demographics
As a men’s clothing company, Criquet had yet to see success targeting women. When we opened up our targeting to women who were married, we saw success in this gift audience.
A gift audience is a group of people who may not be your target market, but they have a close friend or family member who fits your target demographic.
Gift audiences are all about convincing someone who isn’t your customer to buy your product for someone else who is your customer.
This may sound easy, but it requires smart targeting and the right messaging.
That’s why we utilized images of Luke Wilson to grab attention and included terms like ‘husband’ and ‘gift’ in the copy to hone in on the messaging. This is a strategy that works well with other
gift-giving holidays such as Valentine’s Day, Father’s Day, etc.
Once the interest targeting became saturated and we built a large enough seed audience of women, we switched to lookalike audiences.
Optimize Retargeting for Highest ROAS
While you don’t want to necessarily increase our spend in retargeting, you do want to make sure you’re optimizing this low hanging fruit correctly.
Facebook retargeting is the easiest audience to set up, requires the least amount of creative work, and returns you the highest ROI of all ad types.
Leverage Creative to Scale
1. Pivot Creative to Match The Most Relevant Products
When we first launched new creative for Criquet Shirts, their audiences didn’t respond well to them. That’s because while the creative aesthetic was great, we did not match our creative with the products we were currently serving. The creative was advertising the summer collection, yet we were right in the middle of the summer-to-fall transition.
We adjusted the creative to show Criquet’s fall collection.
Switching from promoting short sleeves to showcasing long sleeves products lead to greater engagement and recoup in sales.
2. Adjust Messaging to Match Tone of Brand
Clothing can be subjective; what one person may love, another may hate.
Over the next few weeks we learned that a mixture of humor and lifestyle images of men golfing but not taking themselves too seriously worked best for Criquet Shirts.
We learned to make their audience laugh to increase conversions.
To get the balance right, we used funny overlay text that aligned with Criquet Shirts’ core values.
3. Test Different Ad Types
We tested video ads, carousel ads, single image ads, and ad collections. Our most successful ad format was the carousel ad format, with the first carousel card being a video.
As we mentioned before, clothing products have subjective value that depends on individual taste.
By showing a range of products through carousels, there is a higher likelihood that the user will find something they personally like. Having a video be the first card serves the purpose of educating prospects about Criquet’s brand and their products’ unique value propositions.
Let Facebook Optimize Placements
For Criquet Shirts, we did not limit our ads to a particular placement. Instead, we chose them all and let Facebook optimize on our behalf.
We gave Facebook the power to optimize towards placements performing strongest at any given moment.
In Summary
Scaling your Facebook ad spend without decreasing your ROAS takes testing and time. You need to be willing to try new things, read and interpret the data, then optimize until your campaign is successful.
We tested many audiences and appropriately pivoted our creative in order to deliver high ROAS. We also continually adjusted our messaging, creative angle, ad formats, and bidding methods to improve performance until we achieved a 3.63x ROAS and a $43 CPA.
Want a more detailed look into our work with Criquet? Check out our full case study here
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