Increase in sales from Email Marketing.
Ranking in the SERPS for “Hair Extensions” (monthly vol. 40,500).
Increase in total orders through new acquisitions.
The Challenge
Easilocks is an independent, award-winning hair extension brand offering professional salon services and clip-in hair extensions. The brand was established in 2013 and, in 2016, launched its online store with its first celebrity hair collaboration, Charlotte Crosby’s Miracle Makeover. Since then, Easilocks has collaborated with numerous A-Listers, including Cheryl, Megan McKenna, Olivia Bowen, Kaz Kamwi and more.
Easilocks found themselves relying heavily on celebrity endorsements to help drive sales. While this was a successful strategy for a while, changes to social algorithms and consumer behaviour meant this traditional marketing model soon became ineffective.
When Easilocks approached The Good Marketer in October 2019 to help rejuvenate their entire marketing strategy, we immediately identified the following challenges:
- A website which lacked user experience and Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO).
- A drop in engagement due to social algorithm changes.
- A lack of Google & Meta advertising campaigns.
- A need for marketing support and expertise that Easilocks didn’t have access to from an in-house team.
- A lack of content and creative that was truly resonating with the audience.
Facebook/Instagram Advertising
Our first step in reviving Easilocks’ marketing was to set up and manage their Facebook & Instagram Advertising Campaigns to drive traffic to the website and sales.
A crucial part of the setup was understanding Easilocks’ target customers, their pain points, their interests and their motivations. Aside from the traditional cold interest audiences such as Hair Extensions, we also set up campaigns that targeted people who were interested in relevant and complementary brands, such as Pretty Little Thing, Missguided and Nasty Gal, as well as those who were interested in popular TV shows such as Love Island.
To maximise performance, we combined our granular targeting with tailored ad copy, which was updated regularly to take advantage of key dates such as Payday / Valentine’s Day / Easter / Black Friday / Christmas and so on. This strategy enabled us to keep the ads relevant, reduce frequency and drive additional sales by taking advantage of promotional opportunities, such as 20% off for Valentine’s Day.
Next, we began to target warm audiences to capture those people in the middle of the funnel. We set up campaigns that targeted Easilocks’ 250,000+ email subscribers who were previously not all being reached through traditional channels, as well as those who had previously engaged with our social accounts in the last 90 days. The ad copy and creative used at this stage of the funnel prioritised consumer needs through the use of tutorial-style videos, and social proof through the use of UGC and customer reviews.
Finally, to target our hot audiences, the people most actively engaged with the brand, we set up Dynamic Product Ads. These ads captured consumers at key touchpoints, including basket abandoners over the previous 14 / 30 / 90 days and presented them with the products they had added to their cart. This level of personalisation allowed us not only to retarget the people who were the most likely to convert but also presented a key opportunity to build trust and a branded experience throughout the purchase journey.
Across all stages of the funnel, we placed a great emphasis on creative. In an increasingly visual space and in the wake of platforms like TikTok, we knew we wanted to harness the power of video. Previously, Easilocks’ video content centred around before and after shots with little attention paid to the process of putting the hair extensions in.
In August 2021, we implemented an application video for the Lace U-Part to show the extensions being applied from the back. This resonated with our audience massively, showing how easy it is to apply the product. During the first month of using this video, sales for the Lace U-Part increased by 113%. Making this result even more impressive was the fact that this was one of their most expensive products that had been in circulation for more than 3 years and no longer had any celebrity endorsements. Simply by changing the creative, the sales of this product exceeded all expectations and influenced the type of video content used for Easilocks moving forward, with a heavy emphasis on back-of-the-head applications.
Through consistently refining our audience targeting, implementing new, fresh ad copy and creative, and channelling our focus into remaining relevant and raising the brand awareness of Easilocks, our Meta Advertising campaigns generated noticeable success, including increasing the conversion value of cold audiences by more than 380%.
TikTok Advertising
Following the success of our Meta Advertising strategies, Easilocks decided to use our services to drive additional results through TikTok Advertising.
Easilocks had previously attempted to advertise on TikTok in-house but had seen limited results and now wanted to increase the conversion rate on the channel and lower the cost per acquisition to create a higher return on ad spend.
In order to fine-tune the most effective approach, we started testing various forms of creative. Having already advertised on Meta, we were able to utilise some of the best-performing videos from those channels as an indicator of what type of content customers would respond to. We then tested TikTok-specific content, using videos showcasing the client (a celebrity hairstylist) styling the products on various influencers. This value-driven, tutorial-style content felt more native to the platform than content used previously and was indeed the most effective. In the first three months of running TikTok ads, we increased the conversion rate three-fold on the previous period.
Once our cold campaign was established and successful, we introduced a retargeting campaign to move familiar users down the funnel and increased conversions by more than 35% over a 3-month period.
Google Advertising
When Easilocks approached The Good Marketer, they had not previously run any Google campaigns. As part of our initial setup, we carried out extensive research in order to discern natural groupings into which we could organise their broad range of products, and find targeted, relevant keywords.
We created on-site Collection Pages to which we could drive customers and ensured these were Conversion Rate Optimised by transforming a previously image-heavy layout with optimised copy. Not only did this improve the site’s user experience, but it also enhanced website navigation and Easilocks’ organic SEO rankings.
In addition to standard Search Campaigns, we also introduced Shopping Campaigns and later Performance Max campaigns in order to increase Easilocks’ brand presence in an already competitive market.
During a site audit, we discovered that many products had no descriptions and those that did lacked consistency. To tackle this, we produced optimised copy for these product descriptions in line with our targeted keywords and ad copy. As a result, boosting our Quality Score through increased relevancy.
After an extensive Shopping feed review and optimisation, dynamic remarketing and product image optimisation we were able to achieve a ROAS of over 7.0 and more than 4,000 conversions through our Google ads.
SEO
As was the case with PPC, Easilocks had previously never paid any attention to their eCommerce SEO, despite it driving around 20% of their total traffic.
When we first started, the website itself was very image-heavy, with little to no content on the product/collection pages, along with a large amount of video content. Although engaging to users, this meant the website itself was performing very poorly in comparison to its competitors.
To change this, we needed to create copy that embodied Easilocks as a brand but would also have an impact on the site’s organic rankings. One of the significant improvements we made to the site was to reorganise the structure to offer a “Shop By Colour” element, which not only improved user experience but allowed us to rank for keywords such as “Blonde Hair Extensions” in Position 6.
By adding highly relevant content to the website, we were able to dramatically increase the overall sessions from organic search and decrease the total average bounce rate.
Furthering our SEO efforts, we introduced a consistent backlink strategy to help increase Easilocks’ authority in the eyes of Google and further improve our rankings, striving for high-quality publications in the lifestyle, fashion and beauty space.
Alongside optimising the on-page structure of the website and backlink strategy, we also undertook a full optimisation of the site’s metadata, title tags, alt text and headline text. We then performed a series of extensive audits of the website’s technical health, spotlighting ‘quick wins’ as well as more complex improvements that needed to be made in order to improve the site’s organic ranking to the point of first page appearances for multiple high-value keywords, such as position 1 for “Hair Extensions” (monthly vol 40,500), position 4 for “Clip In Hair Extensions” (monthly vol 14,800) and position 5 for “Clip In Ponytails” (monthly vol 2,900).
Email Marketing
Another area that we identified as an opportunity for improvement was Email Marketing. When Easilocks’ came to us, they didn’t have a consistent email strategy and lacked clear branding, with results remaining stagnant as a result.
With only a standard MailChimp single abandoned cart automation and highly irregular campaign messaging, we immediately identified a breadth of opportunities for expansion. One of the first actions we took was to migrate from MailChimp to Klaviyo – a platform more suited to eCommerce and for which The Good Marketer is a Klaviyo Silver Partner – and focused on implementing a range of automations and audiences relating to key aspects of the customer journey. These included but were not limited to:
- Automated Welcome Flow – offering an initial sign-up discount.
- Abandoned Basket Flow – offering a dynamic product reminder and a discount.
- Abandoned Browse Flow – offering a dynamic product reminder.
- Post Purchase Flow – nurturing customers post-purchase and encouraging reviews as well as repeat purchases.
- Birthday Flow – offering an exclusive birthday gift discount 30 days before the date and also on the day.
- Colour Matching Flow – promoting key colour matching services and encouraging a more personalised shopping experience as this was the entry point for many customers, so this email flow was key.
- Dynamic Product Purchase Flows – offering a more personalised nurture process with highly relevant content for example, if a customer bought a set of hair extensions, an email would be sent encouraging them to buy a complimentary shampoo and conditioner.
- Audience Segmentation.
With these automations in place and a far more sophisticated segmentation of Easilocks’ email subscribers as well as updates to the data capture form, we were able to drive hundreds of email signups per day and generate over £132,000 in revenue from our automations over a 6-month period.
We also implemented a consistent campaign strategy, relating our content to key dates and cultural moments such as payday, bank holidays, celebrities, seasons and events. We also focussed on promotional content for things like new product releases and collaborations, with our best-performing single campaign email generating over £9,000 in revenue on the first day of send.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Conversion Rate Optimisation is where we believe we had the biggest impact and success during our engagement with Easilocks. Whilst our advertising campaigns had performed well without any CRO, we knew these platforms could deliver more sales.
Previously, Easilocks had taken a very direct approach to their website and assumed many people would be aware of their celebrity collaborations and products. However, when we started advertising on Google, Meta and TikTok, we found that this was not the case. Customers could potentially visit the website for the first time via a product page, not the homepage, thus having no understanding of how established the brand’s offerings actually are.
With this in mind, we introduced the following optimisations:
- Collections were introduced to allow customers to shop by product type, such as “One-Piece Hair Extensions”. This refined how the products were categorised in order to introduce a website structure that was user-friendly and optimised for SEO best practices.
- Product descriptions were added detailing the product, the celebrity collaboration, how-to guides and specific details such as length/weight.
- “Shop By Colour” was introduced, allowing customers to see only the products in their colour family.
- “Shop By Collaboration” was introduced to let customers shop by celebrity or partnership ranges.
- Product image optimisations were carried out by both Easilocks’ internal team and our suggested photographer to ensure that all products were well presented on the website and showed their true potential.
- A free delivery threshold was introduced to improve the website’s conversion rate – this was then tested to find the optimal rate for customers and Easilocks.
- Product reviews were introduced to also increase the website’s conversion rate – of which Easilocks now has over 3000, and an average score of 4.3 out of 5.
- The colour matching services were enhanced through the introduction of options like WhatsApp and Calendly for virtual colour matches outside of Instagram (one of the biggest barriers for shoppers).
- Hair samples were also introduced to improve colour matching options – to date, over 9,500 have been sold.
These recommendations were raised after an in-depth competitor analysis, looking not only at the website of retailers within the same space but at how they were utilising images and copy in order to provide a clear customer journey. It was from here that we were able to recognise additional areas of improvement to the structure of Easilocks’ website, optimising it in alignment with the rest of our digital marketing strategy.
By optimising product descriptions in line with our search campaigns, boosting our organic rankings across competitive keywords and driving engaged social users to the site, we were able to create a holistic journey which encompassed every channel managed by The Good Marketer.
By making these structural and content changes to the Easilocks website, we increased the website’s Conversion Rate by more than 15% and raised Shopify orders by 26%.
The Results
Since working with Easilocks, we have:
- Generated more than £4,600,000 in revenue – an increase of 12% compared to the previous period in a competitive landscape.
- Increased returning customer rate by more than 20% through Email Marketing and our retargeting strategies.
- Driven 26% more orders through new acquisition channels and refined spend.
- Driven Easilocks’ best-ever Black Friday Weekend results with a 101% increase in sales YoY.
- Implemented a new, user-friendly website structure leading to an increase in Conversion Rate.
- Increased transactions from SEO traffic by more than 2,800%.
- Achieved position 1 for “Hair Extensions” (monthly vol. 40,500).
- Achieved position 4 for “Clip In Hair Extensions” (monthly vol. 14,800).
- Achieved position 5 for “Clip In Ponytails” (monthly vol. 2,900).
- Ranked Easilocks for over 500 keywords in the top 10 positions and over 100 keywords in the top 3 positions.
- Elevated all advertising through tailored copy, creative and provided ongoing strategic support.
- Created consistent Google, Meta & TikTok advertising campaigns to drive brand awareness and sales.
- Generated over £780,000 in revenue from Paid Search campaigns.
- Generated over £380,000 in revenue from Email campaigns – an increase of more than 4000% on the previous period.
- Worked closely with the client alongside internal teams at every point during the campaigns to ensure consistency, success and (of course) results.
