The Valari is a specialized pillow specifically for gamers, that provides support for their arms and back during long gaming sessions. Before partnering with BAD Marketing, Valari had no content, no website, and no history of sales.
With a brand new product and zero data to build off of, we had to craft a compelling strategy, build a high converting website, curate attention grabbing content, AND manage low stock counts while quickly scaling and remaining profitable.
We began by building out an optimized Shopify store for The Valari, designed to quickly introduce new customers to the brand and the benefits of the gamer pillow, while making it easy for them to place an order. Then, we partnered with our content team to create new scroll-stopping content that would be used across ads, emails and website pages. Since The Valari partnered with us right before Black Friday/Cyber Monday, we knew it was imperative to have all of their assets in place within the first month so we could capitalize off of the velocity of BFCM.
The Valari went live on October 10th. Because of delays in warehousing, our initial launch was a pre-order campaign offering 10% off the total price of the pillow. As expected, sales were slow to start. However, we used this time to determine key objections or points of friction from potential customers, and gathered dozens of essential customer data points to develop our next strategy.
Sessions
Orders
Conversion Rate
In early November Valari had 200 new units arrive at their warehouse, so we were ready to start using our insights from October to begin scaling. We adjusted our creatives and offers to overcome some of the initial objections customers had, and to help increase AOV. Our new offers were 10% off a single pillow, and 20% off two pillows. We then launched our updated ads to our winning audiences from October, and they performed so well that we sold out two days before Black Friday! This meant we had to shift our entire Black Friday strategy to a pre-order sale, rather than a live sale, including updating all of our creatives, copies and content in less than 72 hours. Despite the change in plan, we were still able to triple The Valari’s sales during the month of November.
With stock not expected to arrive until after Christmas, we had to determine how to keep sales coming without any inventory to sell. So, we decided to create gift cards that new customers could order and send to their loved ones, letting them know their Valari pillow would arrive the moment it was back in stock. This helped customers feel that they were getting something physical in return for their money, despite a box not immediately arriving at their door. As gift card sales started coming in, we had another idea: The client had ordered extra pillow covers in case pillows became damaged or stained. We decided to use these pillow covers as part of a BOGO deal, giving customers a free pillow cover if they ordered the larger, more expensive pillow as part of the pre-sale. The bogo offer exploded The Valari’s sales, and by the time stock arrived at the end of December, we had already sold out 75% of their stock.
In December Revenue
Increase in Orders
As January and February rolled around, we knew that maintaining such high revenue with less than 25% of stock remaining would be impossible. So, we encouraged the client to lower their ad spend and focus on keeping ROAS as high as possible. We created a new 12% off offer with free shipping to maintain a profitable AOV, and focused on optimizing our best performing ads. In February we pushed hard on The Valari’s red pillow as part of a Valentine’s Day sale, offering a free red pillow cover if customers bought the largest pillow, or two of the smaller pillows. Our January and February offers generated $96,420 in total revenue, even though we were at a fraction of November and December’s spend!
