One of the major talking points in the business world in the past decade has been about the rise of e-commerce. This is because it's still on the rise, and not just in one place but across the world as studies show that the e-commerce industry is predicted to have increased by 200% in the period of 2014 - 2020.
This growth has given rise to lots of new eCommerce platforms looking to join buyers and sellers together in an equal market place. An example of this can be seen in Sky Garden who drove sales for their retail partners with Facebook dynamic ads, which helped the company to see a 96% lower cost per purchase when compared with previous activity.
Sky Garden was created by a group of Kenyan and Danish entrepreneurs in 2016 and currently offers a simple to use eCommerce platform for African retailers that makes online selling seamless. It’s an all in one place for these companies to go and handle their advertising, inventory management and delivery services.
Sky Garden’s Goal
Sky Garden is partnered with over 3,000 small and medium-sized enterprises, and also have lots of large brands selling their goods through the platform. They wanted to increase high-quality traffic to their own website for these partners in time for the Black Friday shopping period.
In order to achieve this, Sky Garden need to get Kenyan shoppers to engage. Therefore, they created a campaign that only showed products that were relevant to their individual needs and interests accompanied by a call to action to encourage them to buy it. The first stage saw Sky Garden drive traffic to their online marketplace which was done by designing mobile-friendly ads to be in the inherently engaging carousel format. These showcased both images and videos featuring selected products, with discounts and free shipping codes.
These ads were shown to people on their Facebook News Feed, Instagram Feed and Audience Networks who were aged 20-45 in Nairobi and were interested in shopping discounts. Retargeting techniques was also used as the adverts were also shown to people who had recently visited the Sky Garden website, as well as people who had previously added products to their carts. The importance of retargeting ads to people was talked about in our recent social media event, as it improves advert relevancy and therefore conversion rates.
After this initial awareness-building phase was over, Sky Garden moved onto the conversion phase of the campaign. Custom product catalogues of their best-selling products were created based on audience data from Facebook Insights. These were used in dynamic ads to retarget to previous website visitors as well as showing complementary products to people that had already made a purchase. In order to attract more new customers, Sky Garden also used lookalike audiences based on people who had previously made purchases to show them dynamic ads that might appeal to them more.
Using automatic rules to adjust budgets throughout the campaign allowed Sky Garden to keep return on ad spend on track and monitor its efficiency. This real-time response rate is essential to be able to remain adaptive in a dynamic market place.
The effective use of Facebook tools and insights helped Sky Garden to see huge improvements in their marketing efforts, the results of their November 2018 - January 2019 campaign are listed below:
- 96% lower cost per purchase
- 3X higher click-through rate
- 4.3X increase in return on ad spend, compared to previous campaigns
Are you interested in learning more about how eCommerce businesses can be successful on social media? Click here!
Here at Gather, we use the same techniques, optimising campaigns with Facebook’s advanced technology. If your business needs a boost through social media, Gather Social is here to help. We specialise in helping businesses see results through their social media campaigns and adverts. Contact us today to find out how we can help you.
