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Heavy Head Social Case Study
Scaling A Brand To Mid 6-figures A Month The 'CLTV' Way
This guide will show you the ins-and-outs of building and scaling a fashion brand profitably with Facebook & Instagram ads and lifecycle marketing. Enjoy!
INTRO
It’s the best time in history to run an online fashion brand.
Why?
Because people are shopping online more than ever.
And even with the whole iOS privacy ‘thing’.
There’s still a way to run Facebook ads with a great and stable ROI.
High and consistent monthly revenue.
Now – I’m not going to say this is easy. Far from it.
Fashion eCommerce is a tough market. It’s not just about finding a winning product or creative.
In fashion the seasons change, products change, fashion in general changes. Worst of all… winning products can sell out.
But none of that matters if you’re focused on the long game.
That’s what this guide is about.
I’m gonna show you how to run Facebook ads the “CLTV way”. So you can generate compounding sales for years to come for your brand.
The same way we did for our client
Grass-fields…
We’ll jump into that in a second.
First a quick check to see if you’re in the right place…
THIS GUIDE IS FOR YOU IF:
• You are spending ($10k+ pm) on Facebook ads but there is no stability. (I.e. your ads are underperforming)
• You’re out of the start-up phase and already doing around $50k per month in revenue
• You have your supply chain in order
• You understand the importance of building a brand people will buy from repeatedly. Not just the initial sale.
This is definitely NOT for people who want to make a quick buck. Like dropshippers or anyone who hasn’t built a proper brand yet.
If that’s you… then you can stop reading now.
It’s important we focus on building a tribe of customers who are loyal to your brand.
Repeat buyers are the key.
Now. Why should you even listen to me?
Our Agency Heavy Head Social has generated $45,541,314 to date, predominantly with Facebook ads.
We [a] understand the fashion industry in excruciating detail [b] specialise in handling budgets at scale.
It’s our forte.
To fully grasp the power of doing ads the “CLTV way” we need to first look at some numbers.
Then…
You’ll understand exactly why this is a long term play.
Ready to take your fashion eCommerce store to the next level?
Or, of course, keep reading on for more…
THE NUMBERS
Facebook isn’t just a short term profit tool.
It’s most powerful when you start to think of it as a customer acquisition tool.
Your brand already has a decent selling process (read: funnel). What I am going to show you here will make your Facebook Ad profits drastically more sustainable…
Predictable.
Reliable.
& Long term.
The first step? Switch your mindset from short term thinking to long term thinking.
Take a look at the table below…
Let’s break the numbers down together.
Short term thinkers want the biggest return possible from Facebook Ads. From a $10,000 ad spend they want an 6x ROAS (return on ad spend).
The harsh reality is… if you want a return like that you can’t spend a lot.
A high desired ROAS leads to a lower ad spend.
You cap yourself with a glass ceiling.
But…
If you are happy with a lower desired ROAS on the front end, say 2.5x, you can spend far more.
The average order value and the repeat rate are the same.
The ONE difference is the customers acquired.
Because long term thinkers can spend more… They acquire 1,500 customers instead of 600!
The upshot?
With a standard 25% repeat purchase rate (fashion is actually closer to 35 – 40% btw ..) you make far more later on.
After 6 months you’ve made $22,500 more than the short term thinker. AND you have more customers. Customers you can sell to forever.
The craziest thing?
That table above is actually the worst case scenario.
In reality that figure will be a lot higher because if you buy a second time you are almost guaranteed to buy a 3rd time. And even a 4th!
So even though the first repeat buy is only 25%… the second one is more like 50%.
If that occurs you’ll actually stack another $33,500 versus $13,000 in scenario 1.
You’ll have made $161,000 profit in scenario 2 versus only $78,000 in scenario 1.
Now ..
Facebook has now become an exponential growth tool!
Your sales will only increase.
These new customers form the lifeblood of your business.
They make sure your brand continues to thrive long after the initial profit.
That’s where this screenshot comes from…
They’ll profit from these same customers another 6 months down the line again. And then another 6 months on.
For years.
Is “recurring sales”. Just like the title of this guide says.
Long term thinkers understand that!
This is why we call this the “CLTV way”.
You maximise the potential of every
customer you acquire.
Want to see how much each new customer is worth to your business? Use the calculator below.
The rest of this guide will show you how to run your ads the “CLTV way”.
YOUR NEW STRATEGY
To run your ads the “CLTV way” you need to…
[a] Spend more than the short term thinkers and expect a lower initial ROAS 2.5x instead of a 6x.
[b] Focus on increasing your Customer Lifetime Value.
The first one is easy enough to do.
But big boutiques don’t know how to increase their customer lifetime value.
There are 4 things you can add to any standard Facebook Ad strategy to make it a long term Facebook Strategy.
Let’s call them “Upgrades”.
Add them onto your existing strategy and you’ll switch to the “CLTV” Facebook ads. I.e. You’ll be focusing on the long game.
Then you can scale up like Bella Ella did ..
I’m going to run you through all 4 Upgrades in this guide.
Let’s dive into the first one…
UPGRADE 1 - FLASH SALES
01
Ok so you’ve switched over to long term thinking now.
Great.
That means you’ll be acquiring a lot more customers on the front end.
New customers are interested in your brand and highly responsive.
A whopping 49% of consumers said they’d like to receive promotional emails on a weekly basis from their favorite brands (Statisca).
New customers DO want to hear from you!
If you are a brand they love… They don’t mind if you send them promotional content.
This mantra extends to other platforms like Facebook too.
Facebook is the most effective all round tool for Fashion brands. The most effective way to leverage it is with a promotional event.
ANDDDD…. The biggest promotional event you can run is a Flash Sale.
Flash Sales (e.g. Black Friday) happen in three parts…
Hype.
Sales.
Retention.
Flash Sales are powerful because they leverage your existing audience and
customers.
In other words: the customers you already have help you get new ones.
Those are the Flash Sale results we got for our client Grass-fields in only 30 days.
If you want us to run it for you – go here.
The three steps (hype, sales, retention) are the same regardless of the brand.
In the hype stage you want to “signal” to the world that something special is about to happen.
Think about the last time you were really excited to see a movie.
You watched the trailer… got excited… made a mental note of the release date. If it was really captivating maybe you even shared the trailer with a friend!
The movie cemented itself in your mind.
You need to do the same thing for your brand in the hype stage. You need people to feel like something special is happening.
When?
A week before the sale starts.
How?
Notify everyone in your warm audience (and some cold) what will happen in the next week.
Run ads building up anticipation for new products or for the upcoming sale.
Here’s an example of an ad we ran…
People engage with these ads much easier.
You can run a mix of video views, engagement and conversion ads in this stage.
This way… when the sale starts you’ve already built up a big audience to target.
It’ll consist of the following:
• Video Views
• Content Views from the pre-sale period
• Add to Carts from the pre-sale period
• Facebook & Instagram Engagers
• Email Engagers last week
• Website Visitors last week
These people are ALL engaged with the pre-sale ad creative.
They are sufficiently hyped up.
So when you open your “shop doors” there’ll be a manic flood of sales – right?
Well, actually, yes.
In the sales phase you simply run Facebook ads to these people.
After the sales come in you’ll have [a] sold to your existing customers [b] generated some new ones.
You generate new ones because your ads are bringing cold audiences into the action too.
Remember that part about inviting your friend to the movie?
That effect happens here but on a much bigger scale.
The initial results for our Grass-fields Facebook campaigns were crazy. In 8 hours we generated over $25,000 in sales at a return of 75x. With the delayed attribution this has gone up to around $30k and an 86x return.
After 2 days of sale we generated close to $50k at a 55x return with Facebook ads.
By using our omnipresent marketing strategies using both organic, paid and email we were able to generate close to $100,000 storewide in a 24 hour timeframe!
Think of the sales above as a “big day” at the movie theatre.
The end effect is your business has grown!
Can you see how everything compounds?
You have sales. AND new customers.
Hint: the new customers usually come from targeting lookalike audiences
* Lookalikes based on the last 7 days of pre-sale audiences (purchases and add to carts).
* Lookalikes based on the last 2-3 days of sales during the start of the sale.
Flash sales happen in three parts remember…
- Hype
- Sales
- Retention
Stage three is retention.
The content in the rest of this guide will shed more light on that.
UPGRADE 2 - SINGLE PRODUCT ADS VS COLLECTION / BRAND ADS
02
Fashion is different to other niches for two main reasons.
First: Your products don’t stand alone. They are part of an overall brand image. Your products are PERFECT COMPLEMENTS to your other products.
Like needle and thread. Or rock & roll.
Someone who buys a bikini top… will almost certainly need the bottoms.
Second: Your product creation/release cycle is much shorter than other businesses.
You’re constantly launching new collections.
For most it’s 4 times a year (aligning with the seasons). For others it’s 8 – 10 times a year.
That’s why…
From an overall ad and strategy perspective, you NEED to focus on selling the collection/brand. Throughout the year!
Move away from selling single products with your ads.
It’s relatively easy to sell single products. But the second you don’t have the volume to back it up… you’re dead in the water.
You have to stop scaling!
Additionally, selling people your collection / brand will typically lead to a higher AOV because people buy more items anyway.
Someone who buys three items is obviously a stronger “brand advocate” than someone who merely tries one.
Let’s explore how this works in practice…
We noticed that when fashion store owners launch a new collection, they usually just put their entire new collection on the website, throw up some ads saying ‘new fall collection launched’ and send people to the new page.
That’s it.
This will only work if the your new collection is world class.
If not, this is a better approach…
Split your collection into multiple parts. Then drip feed your audience several new styles every week or 2 weeks. Keep your warm audiences engaged and coming back.
We’ve seen this do wonders. The screenshots below show a new item launch we did in this exact way.
We split the collection into smaller batches and launched them in two different weeks.
We found Wednesdays were a good day to launch. You can clearly see the uplift on those days.
This is a great way to maximise the effectiveness of your new collections.
WITHOUT trying to sell them as single products.
As you can tell – we don’t do things like everyone else. You’ve gotta zag while everyone else is zigging.
Instead of marking down everything at the end of a season or hoping it will sell out at full price… You can use flash sales (Upgrade 1) in the weeks that you don’t have any new item launches or when you anticipate slow sales. This will give you “peaks” like you can see in the screenshot above.
It’s vital fashion brands run their ads this way.
This is a massive leverage point for you right now.
Why?
Because you have to produce new collections anyway. Doesn’t it make sense to sell them in the most impactful way possible?
As you can see, that doesn’t mean trying to shift each one individually.
It means marketing your brands and collections as a cohesive unit.
THAT is the path towards smoother, more sustainable sales. Where you are maximising the CLTV of every ad.
Yup you guessed it. This is the “CLTV way” of running a Facebook Ad.
UPGRADE 3 - BUILD A “CREATIVE” TESTING SYSTEM
03
How well does your creative perform and resonate with your audience?
THAT’s the most important question when it comes to being successful on Facebook.
It’s the difference between a 2x return and a 5x return.
NOT your audiences.
NOT hacking the algorithm.
NOT manual bidding.
None of that stuff.
Your ad creative rules.
To be successful you’ll need a lot of them.
If you implement the first two upgrades you’ll be running flash sales and multiple campaigns EACH time a new collection is released.
You’ll be testing a lot!
Any ad executive will tell you testing is the key to success.
Every good business is made up of systems.
To compete at this level? You’ll need a system for testing these creatives too.
Let me show you the one we’ve built….
Each campaign has 4 ad sets. All ad sets have a 1x CPA as minimum budget (around 10% of the account spend for the campaign total)
The ad set targets the best performing audience, most of the time a 1% LLA.
Every ad set had 3-5 ads and we would split out, videos, images, carousels and collections ads.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Until we have winning ad creatives.
Creative Testing V2.0
With dynamic creative, we have tried to simplify this process a bit. We now use the following process:
We create a dynamic creative campaign. Again, with the best performing audience (1% LLA
or Customer List).
In the dynamic creative we put the following:
3 Copy Versions
5 Images/Videos
3 Headlines
Product Page URL/Homepage URL/Top Performing Collection URL
We test this again at minimum 1x CPA and let it run to 3x CPA so we can see what the winning combination is. We then take the winning post ID from the dynamic creative and see how this performs on it’s own. We also turn this winning combination into a collection ad to see how this performs.
At the same time we create a dynamic creative version around the best product or best image/video combination to see if we can optimise this one further.
The winners out of this test will be used to scale the campaign.
If we don’t need new creative in the campaign it’s because the performance is good. So we put the creative in a PPE campaign for engagement and build out the creative library.
Don’t stop this process, just rinse and repeat.
The type of creative that works best at the moment is video ads (both normal & collection) and carousel ads.
Need some ideas for ads?
Ok… so you’ve seen the creative system we use.
Building these for our clients is one of our areas of expertise.
We love them.
Want us to build a creative system for your business too?
Save you the hassle of doing it yourself?
Cool.
UPGRADE 4 - OPTIMIZE THE BACKEND
04
The backend is everything that your customer experiences after they buy something.
Everything.
Notice the word “experiences”. It’s not ALWAYS about selling.
These people are now part of your brand. This whole guide has been about building something sustainable. You’re interested in long-term profits.
Well these new customers play a part in that.
How?
Think of these new customers as your army. They are constantly ready for battle.
Now…. anytime you use a Flash Sale (Upgrade 1) they come to your aid. Their purchases and engagement drive further purchases and engagement from NEW customers.
Anytime you promote a new collection (Upgrade 2) the exact same thing happens.
These customers grow to recognize the message of your brand. What it feels like to be part of it. Because they are familiar with your creatives (Upgrade 3).
So how do you make your army work for you?
Well – some of it will happen naturally. Any business worth its salt will get some word of mouth growth. Studies show that a satisfied customer will tell about 3 people.
But – for the rest you’ll need to utilize retargeting.
Here’s a real world example of it in action…
REAL WORLD EXAMPLE OF RETARGETING:
Bringing it back to Grass-fields (the business the headline of this guide refers to).
Let’s look at how retargeting helped us bring in $416k at a 6.5x ROAS in 60 days.
Something we were really successful with was targeting the email list (split into different segments) in a separate campaign.
We used a similar layout to what our email flows looked like and were getting returns of up to 16x in some of the segments.
The other thing we did was target the bottom of the funnel audience twice. We created 2 campaigns targeting the same audience of people that added to cart. The result was $2 add
to carts… pretty impressive.
Campaign 1 – Conversion Campaign with DPA ad targeting the add to carts, we kept the segments big enough (3 day and 4-10 days) as we saw performance was best in bigger audiences.
Campaign 2 – Reach Campaign with video ads, targeting the exact same audiences as above with a 100% overlap to hit them with a different piece of content.
This strategy worked extremely well and delivered a 10x+ on both campaigns.
Budget splits are important to look at.
We normally use 60 to 70% of our budget for cold audiences, 20-30% for middle and bottom of funnel and 10% for loyalty/retention.
When we had a flash sale or new collection launch, we focused on building audiences up in the week(s) before and then during the launch or sale period shift budget over to the bottom of the funnel and retention stage. The split was more like 50/50 or even 40/60 cold/warm during these days/weeks.
Pretty impressive.
Retargeting is not the only way you can optimize the backend of your business. Email marketing is helpful too.
Email Marketing
At this stage you should have automated flows for abandon cart, post purchase etc.
Additionally we encourage all our clients to send out weekly emails.
2-4 value emails a week to keep the list hot.
Then one sales campaign monthly. These can be for a flash sale. A one day event. Whatever you have going on in that particular month. These emails are focused purely on driving sales.
Can you see how all the Upgrades work together?
They all support each other.
In the end…
The Flash Sale alone generated $416k for Grass-fields.
Then by continuing to use the other upgrades above we generated a further $354k for them over 6 months.
We will continue to generate revenue for them using this system.
In the months and years to come.
It’s sustainable.
Which conveniently leads me to my final point
YOUR NEXT STEP...
Do you really want your brand to reach its potential?
If so… utilizing “CLTV” Facebook ads is the way to go.
NO MORE ads promoting a single product.
NO MORE off brand creative.
NO MORE half baked sales that underperform.
All that stops here.
The CLTV approach to running Facebook ads ensures you maximize your customer lifetime value. WHILE giving them a great experience.
Win-win.
Now you’ve seen all the information you have three basic options.
Option 1 is to continue to focus on the short-term. Hope the Facebook algorithm doesn’t change.
Option 2 is to continue with the status quo. Do nothing.
Option 3 is to work with us.
If you do, we’ll build and run a revenue generating machine for your business.
One designed for long-term results.
One that’ll cement your place as a brand.
Why?
Because we focus on maximizing your customer lifetime value. The “lifeblood” of your business.
You don’t have to lift a finger.
If you qualify you can hand the responsibility over to us.
Hit the link below to sign up…
