Our client, Baltic Essentials, is an online retailer of therapeutic jewelry for child and adult pain management. The business operates a brick-and-mortar store in the Dallas, TX area, and their products are sold in over 75 physical store locations around the world.
In late 2018, Baltic Essentials partnered with EmberTribe to find sustainable strategies for scaling. When we started working with Baltic Essentials, we wanted to find out what marketing they had done in the past and get a sense for what worked, what didn’t, and how we might want to proceed with testing. Previously, our client had decent success running paid traffic using Google Ads and Facebook ads to draw customers to their website. Once customers entered the funnel, Baltic Essentials utilized a few tactics for retargeting audiences and sharing that resulted in sales. Some other components of their growth strategy were: building a customer email list, running giveaway contests, coupons, BOGO offers, and email marketing.
Overall, the client had a strong online following and positive Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) with retargeting, but had been unable to scale spend on a consistent basis. After working with other agencies without success, they partnered with EmberTribe to overcome their scaling barriers. By applying our methodical approach to eCommerce growth, our growth specialists have increased Baltic Essentials’ monthly revenue by 123% from October 2018 (when we initially partnered with the client) to October 2020.
Our first full month partnering with Baltic Essentials, they brought in $113k revenue.
Exactly two years later, through EmberTribe’s marketing efforts, we have helped our client more than double monthly revenue using fewer channels more effectively.
Baltic Essentials uses a multi-channel approach (which we recommend for a strong growth system), but Facebook has been a key central component of their growth strategy. Keeping the Facebook funnel healthy was a huge piece of our strategy with this client because it has brought in proven-results. With Facebook ads as our growth engine, we would be able to test additional channels for generating traffic and sales
Our approach to using Facebook to scale Baltic Essentials involved lots of testing and optimization for our Facebook ads at top of funnel (ToFu), middle of funnel (MoFu), and bottom of funnel (BoFu). Smart testing for campaign types gives us valuable insights into what campaigns work best for different points in the sales funnel. For instance, we might discover that dynamic creative flops at ToFu but drives tons of conversions at BoFu.
Some experiments we ran were:
By approaching Facebook ads with a signature EmberTribe “always be testing” outlook, we were able to hone in on what would work in the account and what wouldn't. As we continued to use Facebook as a tool for growth, the larger audiences prompted a need for more scaling, as well as paying attention to the day-by-day account activity to inform our scaling decisions. This is the beauty of active management—you don’t have to wait until you’ve maxed out on budget or your ads are delivering terrible ad spend to take action. Instead, you can make informed decisions about your accounts in near-real time based on data. So while our growth specialists will typically scale up spend vs. down, they sometimes discover that it’s necessary to pull back on spend under certain conditions.
Here’s a snapshot of some of our Facebook ads learnings in 2020:
Scaling a business properly requires that businesses go through the three stages of growth: traction, profit, and scale. When Baltic Essentials began their engagement with EmberTribe, they had already reached the profit phase and were ready to start scaling. The secret to scaling isn’t really a secret at all: you need to approach growth with intentionality. Create a solid foundation for growth, iterate on successful processes, and do it all consistently.
Almost counterintuitively, one of the worst things you can do to scale your investment in Facebook ads is start pumping money into campaigns quickly. It can actually tank your performance by causing Facebook to restart the learning process. This is what makes scaling one of the most technically complicated pieces of the puzzle, and a big reason why we coach our clients through building repeatable systems for testing and growth.
In our partnership with Baltic Essentials, we were able to build the consistent, repeatable growth system for sustainable profit, and that has been in large part due to our success on Facebook. In 2020, $862k of the total store revenue came from Facebook alone. With Facebook as a reliable growth engine for our client, we have been able to test additional advertising channels without losing steam in overall revenue lift.
As a rule of thumb, no business should rely on a single channel for their growth strategy. We love Facebook because it’s a powerful engine for growth! But we don’t love putting all of our eggs in one basket. Thanks to the success of Baltic Essentials through Facebook advertising, we’ve been able to test and validate other social media channels for our client that we can nurture for scaling over time.
