Soft Surroundings increases revenue 31% with incrementality measurement

Drive new customer acquisition and increase topline revenue

Soft Surroundings is a leading direct marketer and specialty retailer of branded apparel, accessories, beauty products, and home furnishings. Founded in 1999 the brand operates a mail-order catalog, an e-commerce website, and 43 retail stores.

Relying on vendor-reported metrics and last-touch attribution, Soft Surroundings consistently struggled to attract new customers to the brand within defined cost-per-acquisition targets and tune media budgets toward the most efficient tactics. The brand needed a strategic partner to help scale prospecting budgets into the most effective growth channels while guiding profitable reallocation of their current advertising investments.

“The level of partnership we get with Measured is truly top-notch. I was able to feel completely comfortable with the reliability and accuracy of the data and reporting. The speed with which we’ve been able to gain insights into our marketing decisions has been amazing.” Gail Buffington, VP Marketing Analytics

THE SOLUTION

Cross-channel media measurement with experimentation framework

Soft Surroundings’ goal with Measured was to align budgets and tactics to the most efficient channels and drive revenue and customer growth. Measured deployed its experimentation framework across key marketing channels including learning objectives focused on retargeting and Facebook prospecting.

Right-sized retargeting

Within four weeks, the retargeting test was implemented and executed to deliver key insights that guided their marketing team. It was observed that the incremental cost per acquisition CPA(i) was well above what was reported by the vendors (last touch reporting) and their CPA targets. They were heavily over-indexed into their largest retargeting vendor by spend and were serving ads beyond a recommended frequency cap.

The findings led to an immediate reduction in retargeting spend overall and the excess dollars were shifted to Facebook prospecting and other profitable upper-funnel tactics.

Facebook scale testing

Incrementality testing established that Facebook was their most effective and profitable prospecting tactic delivering well below CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) targets. Performance indicated a clear opportunity to scale, which led to deployment of Measured’s Facebook Scale Test. The testing simulated an increase of 1.5x-4x budget spend in a controlled environment and explored scale at the ad set and audience level within their target CAC.

Recommendations included large increases in broad audience targeting along with smaller increases in underspent higher percentage look-alikes while exposing a lack of growth opportunity in their largest spend 1% look-alike audience.

THE RESULTS

Within one year of working with Measured:

Topline revenue improved 17% MoM while YoY sales increased 12% with new customer acquisition.
The brand profitably scaled into five new digital tactics.
Increased Facebook prospecting spend by 30x validated against incremental net profit goal.
Scaled catalog prospecting against incremental net profit goal.

Key Takeaways

Better measurement enables better decisions.
Incrementality measurement clarifies each media tactic’s contribution to the business.
Incrementality-driven media mix decisioning can turbocharge growth for direct-to-consumer businesses.