Taking a VC Backed CPG Startup Through The Holidays

KNOW Foods
Taking a VC Backed CPG Startup Through The Holidays

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KNOW Foods


KNOW Food is a well-known brand in the health foods and CPG e-commerce space.


When they came to us it was with a problem and an idea of how to solve it:

“Our current performance with a traditional agency is less than a 2 ROAS, and in order to make a profit (not break even) we need to scale both spend and return.”


After seeing this poor performance and wanting to learn how to increase their ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) we dove into an account analysis and started to target their goals (above 3:1 ROAS.)


We started slow with a $100 a day but quickly scaled to $500-600 a day seeing a stabilized and consistent 3:1 ROI (although in finality reaching 5 ROAS.) 


Despite our optimistic outlook and the initial positive results of our paid marketing efforts, KNOW FOODS still needed to reach more new customers and increase the repeat purchase rate of those newly acquired customers. 


The first thing we did was break down their site traffic based on the relationship between pageviews and conversions.  We looked at the pages that were driving the most sales per view and the customer segments that were trafficking those pages.  

Project Details

KNOW Foods


KNOW Food is a well-known brand in the health foods and CPG e-commerce space.


When they came to us it was with a problem and an idea of how to solve it:

“Our current performance with a traditional agency is less than a 2 ROAS, and in order to make a profit (not break even) we need to scale both spend and return.”


After seeing this poor performance and wanting to learn how to increase their ROAS (return-on-ad-spend) we dove into an account analysis and started to target their goals (above 3:1 ROAS.)


We started slow with a $100 a day but quickly scaled to $500-600 a day seeing a stabilized and consistent 3:1 ROI (although in finality reaching 5 ROAS.) 


Despite our optimistic outlook and the initial positive results of our paid marketing efforts, KNOW FOODS still needed to reach more new customers and increase the repeat purchase rate of those newly acquired customers. 


The first thing we did was break down their site traffic based on the relationship between pageviews and conversions.  We looked at the pages that were driving the most sales per view and the customer segments that were trafficking those pages.  


We then looked at which segments of this customer base we could most effectively target on the paid channels we were using.  


After that it came down to a two different tasks:

  • Build out their advertising remarketing funnel
  • Utilize previous customers as a model for prospecting


Often we find that people neglect remarketing more than anything else within their business.


They often claim they’ve either tried remarketing before or that they don’t want to market to existing customers.


Remarketing is one of the most crucial areas of business.


If your customers aren’t being treated right and rewarded for their initial purchase, why would they ever come back?


For instance, one of the most basic campaigns on Google Search is the Branding Campaign.


In this campaign, you buy all of your own branded keywords. Not only do you see an incredible return, but it actually helps train your pixels and improve your account ranking.


With KNOW, we immediately noticed that remarketing would need to be set-up with an in-depth ads funnel (Steps 1-5 for cold to repeat buyer audiences).


In order to do this, we set up an ads funnel that seamlessly led their customers from a cold to a warm audience pool by consistently remarketing users while varying the creatives used (user-generated product reviews, product shots, lifestyle shots, etc….).  


We also set up the tracking to take advantage of existing product catalogs for our ability to use dynamic remarketing ads. 


After building out the bottom of the funnel first, we then expanded the audiences slowly making our way to cold traffic.


As you can see above, this lead to some pretty substantial results within the first 60 days of working together.


Transitioning To Black Friday and A Pre-Black Friday Sale


Now before we dive into the numbers, let me note, a pre-black Friday sale always works better than a Black Friday sale.


Lower CPMs, less competition, and the same amount of buyers, helps to create a sale that kicks ass, prior to Black Friday.


Now during that period, we ran two sales:

  • Halloween
  • Black Friday - (Our “Better Than Black Friday Sale”)


Here are the results from our Halloween sale:



During a four-day period, we helped drive over $51,000 of revenue directly correlated to facebook with only $9800 of ad spend. (utilizing Facebook’s 1 day last click attribution window)


We managed to stay relatively conservative during this effort in order to test the audience for a sale and see how this sale would prime audiences for our pre Black Friday sale.


This is also something that we often suggest.


Running a frequent (every 6 weeks) sale paired with consistent advertising without discounts (in order to refresh customer expectation).  In our experience this is the sweet spot where the majority of CPG brands will experience increased revenue, reduced advertising costs, and an increasing AOV.


Summary

In our time working with KNOW Foods, we managed to help pull the 2 ROAS original results up to between 3-6 ROAS depending on the day.


An increase of over 50% within just two months, that allowed us to help scale and gave us a larger budget to allocate to prospecting campaigns (cold traffic campaigns used to find new customers).

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