VanMoof: Rolling onto Success with Facebook Ads

23 October 2019

Have you ever heard of an electric bike? If not, things are about to change. Currently, there are 50,000 - 60,000 bikes sold each year in the UK out of 3 million overall bike sales. However, the evidence points towards a serious increase in sales of electric bikes over the next 30 years.
This has paved the way for e-bike manufacturers to take advantage of this recent surge in interest. Which is exactly what VanMoof did when they used Facebook video ads to boost their brand awareness and increase checkout sessions in their online store by 3.2X.
Founded in 2009 by the Carlier brothers, VanMoof is an Amerstadam-based bike company. Their aim is to create the most effortless city A-to-B experience by designing electric bikes with fully integrated tech. With stores in Amsterdam, Berlin, London, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Taipei and Tokyo, and riders buying online worldwide - describing VanMoof as a global company is an understatement. 

The Campaign


The goal of their campaign was to encourage curious people that might be interested in learning more about e-bikes to visit their website and potentially make a purchase through their e-commerce platform. 
Videos are a great way for a company to get potential customers to engage with their products, as the inspiring imagery can allow the user to receive lots more information about the product in comparison to how much they can get out of a static image. This allowed VanMoof to showcase both their brand and the e-bike models on offer, more specifically the highly anticipated Electrified S2 and X2 models. Based on the results of previous Facebook campaigns, VanMoof selected the most appropriate aspect ratio for the video that historically drove the highest engagement rates, whilst also highlighting only the essential features customers were most interested in.
During this campaign, three different edits of the video were created in order to highlight a different aspect of VanMoof bikes. After this, they sent these videos to lookalike audiences based on previous customers, focusing on people aged 29-55 in cities from the Netherlands, Germany, US, UK, France and Japan. Having been optimised for website conversions, the videos were placed on their Facebook News Feed, Instagram feed and Instagram Stories. 
Keeping track of a campaign is essential for receiving real-time information on the performance of their strategic efforts. With this in mind, VanMoof’s team used Ads Manager and Facebook pixel events such as checkout initiations and newsletter signups to stay up to date with the results. The company also conducted a brand lift and conversion lift study to help them understand how the ads were having an impact on both brand metrics and incremental sales.
This campaign ran for 2 weeks during April 2019 and saw above industry average jumps in ad recall and brand awareness, whilst also increasing the number of people who started the checkout process from seeing the ads. The actual figures are listed below:

    • 3.2X more checkouts initiated

 

    • 11-point lift in top-of-mind awareness

 

    • 12-point lift in ad recall

 

    • 157X increase in website leads (newsletter signups)



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