The Pearl Source

Brand Story

Pearl Source was founded in 1991 with a pure focus on pearls. During their 20 years in business, they became one of the largest importers of freshwater, Akoya, Tahitian and South Sea pearls worldwide. Pearl Source wanted to break into the modern age of social media ads by creating a powerful remarketing channel to generate an uplift in their revenue stream.

The Objective

Pearl Source’s main growth came from traditional marketing channels such as a massive email list, SEO and direct-search PPC on Google. Because pearl shopping is more native to platforms that allow price comparison, they wanted to focus on remarketing to their audiences to create an uplift in LTV and CVR on their website.

Challenges

It was not the first time that Pearl Source tried using Facebook ads. Their main challenge was to measure actual uplift in sales with the addition of a new marketing channel. The biggest challenge in setting up multi-marketing channels is to truly evaluate the uplift in revenue that results from the addition of a new marketing channel. We didn’t want to stick to the easy route and just go off the numbers that Facebook reported, we wanted to measure a true uplift in sales.

The Strategy

Pearl Source is a well established brand with a huge customer base and a massive amount of email subscribers, and we knew that we had to incorporate these assets into our strategies. The main concern from Pearl Source was that because they were introducing a new marketing channel, they wanted to ensure it contributed to their profitability and sales. They wanted to do a clean test that would utilize both a control and test group to allow them to see if there is an actual uplift in sales for the remarketing campaigns. 

Our strategy was simple. Our first goal was to create the perfect segmentation among visitors who haven’t purchased yet. Knowing that the process of buying a pearl is longer than the average sales journey, we decided to segment users into 15-20 different groups depending on their level of intent. We used the audience creation tool to segment users from one daysince last visit, all the way back to 45 days. In addition, we added an additional parameter of value in order to segment users based on their potential value. Users who were interested in higher priced items were targeted separately, as the ROAS on these users would be extremely high so we could spend more on them. 

Once audience segmentation was done, it was time to focus on creative and copy. Our design team created creative offers that would be most effective for each audience group. The copy and creative had to match the intent level to ensure we can convert as many users as possible. We designed ads using the following structure. Users who visited the website most recently and showed a strong intent were targeted with aggressive offers and coupons codes to make sure they convert. Then, users who didn’t convert during that time frame were shown ads that promoted product and brand credibility by focusing on educating users about the product. The users who didn’t convert after that time frame were targeted with a mixture of direct offer ads that included customer testimonials promoting brand credibility along with a strong action message in efforts to convert them. 

Last, Pearl Source requested that we run a data statistical significance test to measure the true ROAS on the ads, which is also known as incremental ROAS. We created a control and test group by randomly separating US zip codes into two groups. Group #1 didn’t see any ads on Facebook, group #2 saw the remarketing ads on Facebook. We then measured only the uplift of group #2 and divided the uplift by the actual ad spend to get the true incremental ROAS. After six months of hard work, we reached a 9x ROI for the people who saw the ads from Facebook. Our goal for the following year is to start driving prospecting traffic and to provide an additional revenue stream from pure cold traffic visitors.