Friday, December 30, 2022
In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇
📦 How the Pilot Program and RUX crushed Black Friday sales
📦 How to make costly and complicated development a thing of the past
📦 Utilizing lead generation lists, pre-sales, and creative testing to understand what resonates with your shoppers
📦 New year, new content
📦 Unique non-toxic fragrances, African safari-inspired decor, and cruelty-free bags
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe, so you never miss out.
Welcome back to part three of Campaign Confidential – The series where we open the campaign case files of real businesses using Pilothouse’s Pilot Program – a service that helps brands that don’t quite meet the typical agency criteria to scale affordably. 💸
In part one, you met RUX and learned about their pilot testing angles and results. In part two, you read about how the RUX and Pilothouse teams got ready for the biggest shopping days of the year – Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BF/CM).
Before we dive in, take a peek at RUX’s account averages from November 1–21 (the day before the first pre-sale launch):
On with the show! You’ve got the background, you’ve seen the planning, now it’s time to reveal the results! 📈
But first, here’s what RUX offered their shoppers as a Black Friday promotion:
Early Access (November 22–24):
BF/CM (November 25–28):
💥 Pre-sale exclusive offer: November 22–24
Remember those lead generation campaigns from part two? Those 600+ users are now ready to be targeted with the pre-sale offer! The offer was also used for social campaigns to drum up more sales and garner attention.
Pre-sale campaigns aren’t just for offering first dibs. They also:
1️⃣ Give the list an extra push to purchase.
2️⃣ Help the Pilothouse and RUX teams determine early winners for both creative and copy to be pushed out on the big day!
During this two-day pre-sale, RUX saw:
Additionally, the pre-sale-specific email list converted at a $10 CPA and 35 ROAS! This goes to show the true value of lead generation up to the BF/CM sale. 💪
Here’s the ad that had people clicking and converting most from the early access pre-sale: 👇
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📦 BF/CM: November. 22–28
The pre-sale helped foster an understanding of which ads were converting. Having this info handy meant the team could prioritize launching those along with top creative on BF. 🚀
The campaign structure was initially:
These campaigns had a 7-day-click, 1-day-view attribution and were mainly set up with Campaign-Level budgets. 💰
Once winning campaigns were determined halfway through the first day, the Pilot Program team duplicated them and created identical campaigns with the top creatives that had a 1-day-click attribution to give the account an extra push along with scaling budgets.
Each day, the team would “surf” winning budgets. 🏄♀️ How? By consistently increasing the winning campaigns every morning. If a campaign had a strong CPA and the day was early enough, we’d bump it up and keep doing it until results show a dip.
For the final push, the team launched extended messaging on top creatives in their own retargeting and prospecting campaigns.
On the last day of the sale, ‘Last Day/Final Chance’ messaging was launched. 🚨 By retaining these in their own campaigns while also continuing to run the existing winners, we saw budgets increase by quite a bit (5x daily average) and the results improved. Music to a marketer's ears. 🎶
🤖 Cyber Monday
To cap it all off, the team launched Cyber Monday creatives with the same offer.
One notable win was that the top-performing campaign in the Black Friday period wasn’t actually a Black Friday campaign! The top performer was actually a prospecting winter campaign focused on winter sports messaging. ❄️
This was RUX’s first winter running ads and was a great test to prove that shoppers see value in their products in every season!
Prospecting winter evergreen campaign results (November 25–28):
Additionally, the VIP list from the pre-sale continued to convert well during the true BF/CM sale.
VIP lead generation BF/CM campaign results (November 23–28):
Like we saw in part two, RUX shoppers value simplicity when viewing creatives and copy. The simpler, the better! The most effective ads in the sale were simply product shots with Black Friday or Cyber Monday written right in the creative itself (as seen below).
✨ Conclusion
The sale was a HUGE success leading to multiple record-breaking days for RUX:
See you next week, same place and same time, for the final issue of Campaign Confidential – where the Pilot Program team will share a deeper dive into the BF/CM results and 2023 planning. ✅
New Year, New Content
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