How New Balance Drove 200% More Sales at Half the Cost Using Unbounce

For many on-line entrepreneurs, getting clients to enter their cost particulars and click on “buy” is the last word conversion. However for New Balance Chicago, on-line gross sales aren’t the purpose in any respect.

Likelihood is you’ve worn a pair of New Steadiness sneakers or know somebody who swears by them. Headquartered in Boston, New Steadiness is a world, 109-year-old model endorsed by Welsh footballers, Canadian tennis stars and American baseball gamers.

Within the Chicago space, nevertheless, New Steadiness’s brick-and-mortar shops are owned and operated as a household enterprise – with an area advertising finances. Though they do get a minimize of the ecommerce gross sales that come by their on-line channels, their major purpose is getting individuals’s precise toes within the literal door.

So you may perceive why, till not too long ago, on-line advertising appeared like extra of a distraction to the corporate than a possibility.

“Their typical advert purchase was throughout a Cubs radio broadcast, not a cross-device digital marketing campaign,” says Brian Davidson, co-founder of Matchnode, the digital advertising company tasked with serving to New Steadiness Chicago drive – and monitor – its in-store gross sales by on-line channels. “We knew that we might face some challenges.”

Over the course of some months, Brian’s workforce tackled these challenges toes first. Utilizing a mixture of focused Fb adverts, campaign-specific Unbounce touchdown pages and customized emails, they had been in a position to generate tons of of leads and drive hundreds of {dollars} in gross sales at half the advert spend.

That is the story of how they did it.

The primary marketing campaign: Fb presents don’t supply sufficient

Match Node’s unique technique for New Steadiness revolved round Facebook Offers, which permit entrepreneurs to embed low cost codes in Fb show adverts.

The primary marketing campaign, which launched throughout a chilly Windy Metropolis winter, allowed a buyer to obtain 15% off when temperatures had been freezing and 20% off if the climate fell under zero Fahrenheit. Brian’s workforce aimed the adverts at a large viewers of people that:

1. Lived in zip codes close to New Steadiness shops in Chicagoland (the higher Chicago space)
2. Regarded just like earlier New Steadiness clients: Utilizing Fb advert focusing on, they created a “lookalike audience” based mostly on buyer emails, which the shops had been accumulating at checkout.
3. Had related pursuits like “health” and “Chicago marathon” listed of their profiles.

The adverts reached 136,541 individuals and resulted in 600 presents being claimed. This generated greater than $5,000 in gross sales, which Davidson thought of successful.

“These had been strong outcomes as they exceeded same-month advert spend and we all know the shopper ROI extends out over many months and a number of purchases,” Brian says, “however we knew that monitoring wanted enchancment.”

In reality, they had been solely in a position to monitor 32 particular person buy codes. The issue was that as a way to monitor the codes, the corporate needed to depend on clients and clerks taking the time to report the low cost codes on the level of buy. The codes themselves had been distinctive, however the 15% low cost was promoted on varied channels, that means clients may have heard in regards to the sale in a variety of locations.

They may have tracked the codes utilizing buyer emails, besides Fb gained’t give advertisers the names or e-mail addresses of customers who obtain coupons. Regardless of the marketing campaign’s relative success, utilizing Fb Presents proved to be a irritating expertise for a data-driven, optimization-minded marketer like Brian.

“The restricted means we needed to monitor success was removed from actual time,” Brian says. “Each week or two we’d get gross sales quantity by promo code, however the in-store nature of the acquisition restricted any real-time conversion information that we’d usually use to tune and refine a pure e-commerce marketing campaign.”

Then in the future, all the pieces modified.

Cell responsive touchdown pages to the rescue

One other limitation of the Fb Presents technique was that there was no related on-line vacation spot to ship customers to as soon as they claimed the coupon. Directing them to the New Steadiness web site was out of the query because it solely elevated the probability of an internet buy, which didn’t profit Brian’s consumer. It additionally didn’t give them the chance to create a devoted expertise for every particular marketing campaign.

Furthermore, given that almost all of Fb advert clicks got here from cellular customers, sending potential clients to a web page that wasn’t optimized for cellular customers would have been like “chopping off our nostril,” says Brian.

Out of the blue, that was not an issue.

“When Unbounce launched mobile responsive landing pages, we had been thrilled,” Brian says.  “We had used Unbounce for quite a few touchdown pages and with its cellular launch, we made a tactical shift away from utilizing Fb Presents and utilized Unbounce to seize e-mail deal with conversions.”

Utilizing Unbounce’s touchdown web page builder, Brian says his designer “just about cloned” the nationwide New Steadiness web site as a place to begin, however then made just a few key tweaks to ensure it was optimized for offline conversions.

As a substitute of web site navigation and hyperlinks to buy merchandise on-line, the web page featured details about New Steadiness’s Chicago shops, together with Google Maps, cellphone numbers and in-store advantages like old-school fittings, one thing few different shoe shops supplied.

As soon as the touchdown web page was constructed, Match Node created a collection of Fb adverts geared toward very particular segments. The primary marketing campaign promoted a reduction for U.S. navy veterans (New Steadiness’s “Made in America” credentials are a key differentiator for the model):

Clicking this advert…

… sends you to this touchdown web page:

Geared toward an ultra-targeted viewers of 45,000 navy vets, the adverts generated greater than 200 coupons, which had been despatched to leads after they entered their emails on the touchdown web page. This meant that as an alternative of crossing their fingers that individuals would print out the coupons and produce them into the shop, they had been in a position to accumulate the emails of patrons – and comply with up with them.

In simply two months, New Steadiness Chicago’s e-mail listing grew by greater than 10%.

“Unbounce was very useful on this case as a result of we may instantly tie the New Steadiness touchdown web page to any Mailchimp or Fixed Contact e-mail advertising account,” Brian says. “For organizational and segmenting functions, we created particular e-mail teams for every marketing campaign we had been operating.”

With these emails tied into particular campaigns, they had been in a position to go “one step additional within the funnel” and ship out reminder emails, urging results in declare their reductions.

Open charges for these reminder emails had been 5-10% above New Steadiness’s common promotional emails, says Brian.

The lead gen element of this technique was the cherry on prime for Brian’s consumer.

“There’s an inside worth placed on e-mail,” Brian says. “It’s one thing tangible to them.”

Optimizing for conversions and replicating success

There’s yet another component that made these campaigns so profitable. Utilizing Fb’s advert platform, entrepreneurs can select to optimize their advert spend both for clicks or for “web site conversions,” which implies actions taken outdoors of Fb’s ecosystem.

As soon as they began sending individuals who clicked on the adverts to devoted touchdown pages, Brian’s workforce may optimize their campaigns for touchdown web page conversions, which is much extra environment friendly than gunning for clicks.

With this technique, they had been in a position to spend 50% much less and drive 200% extra in gross sales in comparison with the Fb Presents campaigns they ran beforehand.

The navy veterans marketing campaign was just the start. Utilizing Unbounce, they might simply duplicate the unique touchdown web page and tweak the design for every other supply New Steadiness needed to advertise.

All year long they’ve run profitable promotions for all the pieces from Foot Well being Consciousness Month, to athletic attire, to children’ footwear. They’ve perfected the method alongside the best way, testing copy changes (resembling main with the low cost vs. main with the “free becoming” profit) and swapping out photographs on the touchdown web page to match the adverts that Fb’s algorithm recognized as probably the most profitable.

By making incremental adjustments, Brian says they’ve been in a position to enhance conversion charges by 5-10% all through the course of a given marketing campaign (which frequently interprets to 5-10% extra gross sales).

One change that labored particularly nicely was specifying on the web page that New Steadiness’s in-store becoming is 100% free:

Variant A

Variant B

The variant with the phrase “free” boosted conversions by 16%. Which will appear pretty apparent, nevertheless it’s one more reminder that after getting the suitable technique in place, small steps can take you a good distance.

If the shoe matches

Some options are so good that they clear up issues you didn’t even know you had. Trying again, the challenges Brian’s workforce was employed to assist clear up had been:

• Utilizing on-line advertising channels to generate in-store gross sales relatively than ecommerce purchases.
• Discovering an environment friendly solution to monitor whether or not they had been doing so successfully.

And using Unbounce, they had been in a position to:

• Drive gross sales.
• Develop their e-mail listing with certified leads.
• Nurture these leads.
• Cut back their value per acquisition.
• Goal high-value cellular customers.
• Simply replicate and optimize their most profitable campaigns.

For sure, the oldsters at New Steadiness Chicago are digital advertising skeptics not. And many businesses wish to be in Brian’s footwear proper now.