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Over $1 Million in Store Revenue (an 84% Increase) in 2 Months for High-End Fitness Store

Expanding Reach For Niche Fitness Marketing To Improve Sales

When you fit exercise into your routine, do you like schlepping to the gym through traffic and cranky drivers, or would you rather stay in the comfort of your own home. Probably home, right? But we don’t always have the right equipment to get an effective workout in our living spaces.

Casa Pilates Ad Example

Our client, Casa Pilates Direct, is a direct-to-consumer eCommerce brand selling Pilates reformers and accessories. Their business gets Pilates-related exercise equipment into the home of fitness devotees by curating a collection of the top equipment brands and connecting audiences with the hardware they need to stay fit and stay home.

When Casa Pilates Direct first approached EmberTribe, it was because they were having trouble successfully marketing their high-end equipment to a fairly niche market. Our team was challenged to find the right audiences, hitting ROAS between 4x and 12x, and acquiring new cold audiences for our new partner. 

Casa Pilates Direct partnered with EmberTribe in Q3 of 2020, giving us the perfect opportunity to ramp up for a great Q4 and take advantage of the high-shopping time of year.

Understanding the Pilates Reformers and Accessories Market

When we began our engagement with Casa Pilates Direct, we were aware of several challenges that we would need to test our way out of. First, not all of their brands were selling equally. Secondly, Google ads were proving to be expensive for their needs and Facebook ads were only getting conversions through retargeting campaigns. In a nutshell, we would need to overcome the challenges of a niche market and high target CPA. 

Our first task would be to pinpoint our target audience for this client. We had some data based on their existing audience through Facebook ads, but dug deeper into audience and competitive research to craft a more targeted approach. We were able to pull in some pain points and messaging to help convert audiences based on common concerns, as well as identify key motivations and barriers to purchasing Pilates reformer equipment. 

EmberTribe’s growth specialist developed a multi-channel campaign map to reach target audiences through Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram. We set out to find ways to generate profitable sales from cold Facebook traffic and revamp a Google Ads strategy that would increase visibility and improve click-through rates. 

Testing Ad Creative and Approaches to Find the Right Audience

Our team began our client’s campaign the way we always do: employing smart testing strategies to gather data and test hypotheses.  

We were able to quickly learn:

  • The time frame in which visitors are most likely to purchase.
  • The best types of ads to use for a broad audience. 
  • Which retargeting windows created the best results for middle of funnel audiences.
  • Which top of funnel audiences got purchases, and which lookalike audiences saw results.
  • What brands in rotating carousel ads contributed to the most clicks and most revenue.

We also learned what strategies just didn’t give us the desired results, such as targeting small business owners in the fitness/Pilates industry. 

Thanks to our active testing approach, we were able to pinpoint some critical challenges impacting our client’s success rate. For instance, we initially believed that we could use video creative to increase conversions. It turned out that videos brought engagement, but not conversions. This led us to pivot our videos toward engagement and hook audiences with videos that would lead them to our client’s YouTube channel to keep them engaged with the brand over time.

Another challenge we were able to target is the difficulty It’s been hard to convert cold users for our client’s audiences because of the high average order value. Knowing this, we realized we would have to create educational opportunities for cold audiences to get them familiar with Pilates equipment, practicing Pilates at home, and understanding that set up and assembly services are available through Casa Pilates Direct. 

$1 Million in Store Revenue Thanks to Testing

Starting in November, we began to see big jumps in positive results for our client. This was a cumulation of our testing and optimizations paying off, plus the typical end-of-year boost from holiday shoppers seeking out deals. 

Shopify 2 month results

Between November and January, a two month period, our client achieved $1 million in store revenue. Of this, Facebook accounted for more than $439k revenue, Google for $345k revenue, and Bing for $70k revenue. Overall store revenue increased by a whopping 84% from the previous two month period. 

We were able to achieve 27.83x Facebook ROAS, with 30% reduction in CPM and 55% decrease in cost per checkout initiated. Our Google smart shopping campaigns for Casa Pilates Direct brought in an 53% revenue increase.