Case study
Garden and Outdoor
Our primary directive was to grow sales by optimizing their existing listings and to launch new listings across their e-commerce platforms starting with Amazon.
They felt like their current agency was leaving a lot on the table in regards to advertising management and proactive growth strategies. Coming in, it was going to be an uphill battle because we were taking over the account from another agency that had already lost the clients trust.
Our client had primarily been a wholesaler to brands like Home Depot, Lowes, Walmart and others but their e-commerce presence was new and was the focus of their growth initiatives. Another issue was that each spring they launch about 200 new products per year .
This caused problems for Amazon agencies in a space where talent is hard to find, and to truly optimize listings you cannot just put them up with limited effort and expect your sales to grow. Seasonality added a huge level of complexity and one we had not handled at scale before.
I knew we had our work cut out for us, but that this would be a great opportunity as the category was ripe for a brand that was operating with a high level of Amazon strategy behind it to be successful.
1. Reviewed product photography, and graphics throughout the listings and orchestrated a coordinated plan to create more story-telling images and graphics. We were selling garden and outdoor products, so we needed lifestyle images that reflected this and created an emotional connection to our customers to help us stand out on the digital shelf.
2. We set up numerous integrations from follow up email sequences, to profitability software, to advertising tools and reporting dashboards for greater visibility and better interactions with our customers.
3. We researched, analyzed, and re-wrote the product listings for every product in the catalog and optimized our Amazon listings to reflect relevant searches that were happening on Amazon. We pushed back on the client when they asked for speed, and instead explained to them the value of the Amazon flywheel, and treating every listing like it is the only one you are selling.
3.We added A+ pages for every listing, and created a storefront that reflected the branding, colors, and layout of their website. (Which we later created for them from scratch and implemented)
4. We completely revised the way they were optimizing and executing their Amazon advertising strategy. We broke down the product catalog into different categories, and made sure that we had different campaigns and ad groups for each different category. This allowed us to flex budget and spend to the categories that made the most sense based on the time of year.
5. Seasonality was a big challenge for the advertising team the first year that we worked with the client. By year two, we knew exactly how to execute based on the time of year, and were able to dial in our efforts to be relevant to sku’s that were in stock, and not waste advertising spend on categories that had a shorter seasonal buying window.
6. We added FBM sku’s, and added a shipping cost to these items. This small difference would ultimately be the best move we ever made for the client. As the pandemic came into full destruction mode, (Amazon shut down all non essential items going into Amazon warehouses) we were set up for success as we continued to sell on Amazon despite not being stocked in FBA, and because all of our competitors were out of stock, or didn’t have a well executed plan our FBM listings (Self Fulfilled), became a massive profit center for us.
Over the course of 24 months, we saw:
Sales Growth:
- We took over the account in Dec of 2018. Sales on Amazon ended at $400,000.
- By Dec of 2019, yearly sales on Amazon ended at $1,637,000, or 4X growth Year over Year.
- By Dec of 2020, yearly sales on Amazon ended at $3,585,369
- In 24 months, we saw an increase of 9X growth from initially taking the account, but again a 2.1X growth from the previous year.
- We not only saw 9X growth in top line sales, but we operated at an approximate 11% TACoS (ROI), on the Amazon platform as well.
- We have successfully launched in Amazon Canada, and will be moving into the EU as well by the end of 2021.
