eROAS from Facebook/Instagram Advertising.
Increase in sales from proactive Top of the Funnel marketing.
Drove 320% more purchases over the Q4 period.
The Challenge
Pan-n-Ice was founded in 2015 when founder Henry Milroy travelled to Thailand with a friend. Instantly in awe of the amazing concept of making rolled ice cream they came across during their travels, they decided to bring it back home to the UK. Since its inception, the business has expanded, operating in prestigious locations such as Selfridges, alongside international events in New York City and Abu Dhabi.
When Pan-n-Ice approached The Good Marketer, their success was at a steady level, but their main objective was to improve their marketing strategy to scale through their peak Q4 period.
We identified a few key challenges during our initial consultation:
- Inconsistent sales across their channels.
- A freelancer was running their social marketing resulting in less dedicated campaign efforts during a time when the expansion of their brand was critical to sustainable success.
- Top of the funnel campaigns that were not capitalising on relevant audiences.
Solution
When we started working with Pan-n-Ice in August 2021, their September sales figures suggested less consumer intent to buy the brand’s products than in the summer.
We wanted to take advantage of the busy Q4 period as the perfect opportunity to scale the brand, getting it in front of relevant customers during a time when being ‘top of mind’ would result in more purchases and more loyal customers because of the nature of Q4 as a key purchasing period.
To drive intent, we altered the current message of Pan-n-Ice’s campaigns to focus on gifting and how their products made unique seasonal gifts. This angle opened up opportunities throughout the funnel to capture the audience’s interest at the top of the funnel by addressing a uniquely seasonal pain point – gifting – and then recapturing them with retargeting campaigns that incentivised them to complete their purchase. Of the audiences we tested at the top of the funnel, the highest performing were girl scouts and foodies, which drove 100 purchases and generated a ROAS of nearly 6.0.
This shift to gifting-related messaging proved the most successful for the brand, driving a high level of customer engagement and purchases during the Q4 period. It exemplified an angle of Pan-n-Ice’s products that hadn’t been maximised before and allowed us to scale their visibility with social campaigns that highlighted the unique qualities of the products as gifts compared to other campaigns in the overcrowded eCommerce market around this time.
During this brand awareness stage, we also tested different formats of creatives to understand which garnered the most interest and positive engagement with the target audiences. Of these, it became clear that videos were the strongest for driving performance, achieving a 3.79 ROAS during the Q4 period.
The next stage was ensuring that our developing top-of-the-funnel audiences were retargeted, as the price point meant that this was much more of a considered purchase. We focused our retargeting efforts on audiences that consisted of: Add To Carts within 30 days, Website visitors within 90 days, 25% Video viewers and Social media engagers within 30 days to ensure that we were minimising dropoff.
While the campaigns were live, we also learned that offering discounts weren’t as successful for Pan-n-Ice compared to our expectations. We used this insight to influence our approach with an immediate effect to ensure that we were optimising our campaigns as quickly as possible to remain relevant to our audiences. It prompted us to change strategies, focusing instead on the USPs of Pan-n-Ice and the uniqueness of their brand, rather than relying on a discount-based promotion to boost sales during this period.
As a result of the proactive management of our approach, we were able to scale the budget to £500 a day during Q4. Scaling the budget significantly increased the visibility of Pan-n-Ice as a brand and the social marketing performance during the busiest and most competitive time in the eCommerce calendar.
By scaling our spend according to the top-performing ads and ad sets at each stage of the funnel, we were able to boost the overall effectiveness of our targeting without compromising the return on investment we were seeing.
We helped Pan-n-Ice drive over 800 purchases during November and December and achieved one of their most successful Q4 periods. In particular, over the Black Friday period, we delivered an eROAS of 11.02.
The Results
Throughout our partnership we:
- For Q4, we increased Pan-n-Ice's ad budget by 167% and, as a result, drove a 320% increase in purchases.
- Implemented successful brand awareness and retargeting campaigns with particularly high ROAS during Black Friday.
- Achieved an eROAS of 11.02 during the Black Friday period - the most profitable Q4 for Pan-N-Ice yet.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) per new customer decreased by 56%.
- Product purchases increased by 306%.
- Drove a 79% increase in Conversion Rate.
- Achieved a 182% increase in sales for the LOL collaboration as a result of proactive top-of-the-funnel marketing.
- Optimised the overall campaign structure to be more effective, reducing wasted spending by focusing on high-performing audiences at each funnel stage.
