Carve Designs gave connected TV 60 days at a $20K monthly minimum before deciding it worked, which is about as clean a test as a DTC brand runs on a new channel. The lift showed up first in direct traffic and search, and conversion rates rose across channels for customers who had seen the ads.
Hannah Fleming runs performance marketing at Carve Designs, the coastal apparel brand that grew out of swim. She joins Eric Dyck and Jesse Math of Keen Decision Systems to walk through the bets that take months to pay back: direct mail, connected TV, TikTok and whitelisted ads, plus the Pinterest test that never worked. You walk away knowing how to size a first test, where to look for the halo, and how long to wait before you cut a channel.
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WHAT YOU WILL SOLVE
- Your direct mail gets credit for every buyer on the mailing list. Jesse's question is how many of them would have bought anyway. Carve answers it with holdout panels, including tests that also suppress email and paid social for the held-out group.
- You can't tell whether to mail more. Carve tracks contribution per piece, tests catalog count, page count and size, and reweights audiences between 0 to 12 month and 13 to 24 month buyers.
- Your average ROI says spend more. Jesse's example: a $2 return on $1 million tells you nothing about the next dollar, because the first dollars into a channel return more than the last ones.
- Your other channels swing around the catalog drop. Carve plans spend in every other channel around catalog in-home dates.
- You don't know what a first connected TV test costs. Carve ran 60 days at a $20K monthly minimum, with a fixed window, set objectives and targets, and landed on target or slightly ahead of it.
- You can't find where connected TV sales land. At Carve they land mostly on the site as direct traffic, with a small portion on Amazon, and GA4 shows higher conversion rates for customers who saw a CTV ad and then clicked an email or a paid social ad.
- Your CTV attribution looks too good. Jesse sees brands arrive with platform numbers their CFO doesn't believe. The question to ask is whether you are buying new customers or buying inventory your existing customers already watch.
- You judge upper funnel on a 14 or 30 day window. For brands buying CTV for awareness, Jesse says Keen sees roughly 30% of the measured impact in the short term and roughly 70% over time.
- You're about to kill a channel at month three. TikTok took Carve about six months to gain momentum, and whitelisted ads took close to 18 months before they became a top performer.
- You treat every test as a pass or a fail. Jesse's alternative is to find the 30% that worked, pare back the rest, and keep going.
ABOUT THE GUESTS
Hannah Fleming is Performance Marketing Director at Carve Designs. Shop the collection or request a catalog at https://carvedesigns.com
Jesse Math is VP of Strategic Partnerships at Keen Decision Systems, the marketing mix modeling, planning and forecasting platform. https://keends.com
HARNESS THE HALO
Harness the Halo is a six-part series from DTC and Keen about the spend that doesn't pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it. This is episode 4 of 6, and a new episode drops every other week.
STAY CONNECTED
DTC Newsletter, daily ecommerce marketing and ecommerce growth tactics: https://directtoconsumer.co
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LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/directtoconsumer
SPONSOR
Harness the Halo is presented by Keen Decision Systems. Keen measures the incremental impact of every channel on sales, revenue and profit, and forecasts how a channel will perform before you spend in it. https://keends.com
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