ADKINGS CASE STUDIES

Scaling eCom Business from $199 821/MO to $3 877 354/MO in Just 2 Months and 4 Key, High-Performance Drivers That Made All the Difference

In the Best Case Studies, the Results Speak for
Themselves. Here Is a Sneak Peek:
Month 1 - Scaling Up From
~$2000/d to $130 000/d
Month 2 - Stabilization Phase,
Building Up Business Processes
Taking this brand from $199 821/MO in March to $2 799 821/MO in April and $3 877 354/MO in May. That’s x19 growth in 2 months’ time.

✔ Ramping up Facebook Ads daily ad spend from ~$2 000 up to ~$55 000 per day in 2 months with $1 177 232 spent in May.

✔ Reaching close to 42M unique users with close to 250M impressions.

✔ Making 3.17 ROAS on Facebook Ads in May after the full scaleup.

✔ Making 3.17 ROAS on Facebook Ads in May after the full scaleup.

✔ Making 87 ROAS on Google Ads and YouTube remarketing synchronization with Facebook Ads due to our Everest eCommerce Growth Framework.

✔ Creating more than 30 direct jobs in this client’s business and a myriad more in the supply chain.
Here Is What You’re Going to Learn In This Case Study
➜ Why a good performing funnel is so important in scaling and 7 optimization tricks that gave this business an unfair advantage.

What it takes to spend up to $50-55k a day on Facebook Ads profitably.

How to incorporate other marketing channels like YouTube and Google Ads alongside Facebook Ads to support acquisition efforts and get ROAS 87.

The nasty side of scaling. Problems that arise when scaling x19 in 2 months and how to deal with them.
Introduction
Here at the Adking Agency, we continuously try to take clients to the next level, and we take that mission seriously!

And recently we set out to break the status quo of how eCommerce growth should look like and scaling up an eCommerce brand to an 8-figure powerhouse within just a few months.

It was a challenge we created for us, in line with our brand mission of being a first-choice partner for eCommerce entrepreneurs striving to challenge the old way of doing things and conquer their biggest dreams.

We weren’t sure we’re going to be able to pull it off; after all, there are too many moving parts, and achieving this type of growth is a real challenge not only for us but also for the client.

But most importantly - without the courage to try it - you can’t succeed.

This case study talks about what gave results for this particular client, but at the same time, these strategies can be applied to all eCommerce businesses.
Groundwork to Scaling – a Well-Performing Sales Funnel
If there is one thing in the eCommerce game that can give you the most significant advantage versus your competitors, it's a well-performing sales funnel.

This was a significant deciding factor in this client's success.

If you are wondering what 'well-performing' means, it's probably not what you're expecting.

It doesn't mean that it has a high CR (Conversion Rate).

There is one often overlooked metric that is way more important in the conversion rate optimization game than CR.

It's Revenue per Session.

It's brought on by multiplying the CR with Average Order Value (AOV), which will give you the exact revenue number you are getting per each visitor of the website.

Now let's take this into account and say that Link CPC to drive in a cold traffic customer for you and your competitors costs about the same, and it's roughly $1.

Your competitor has 4% CR and $80 AOV. This means his revenue per session is AOV * CR = $3.2

And let's say you have 3.5% CR and $120 AOV.

This means your revenue per session is a whopping $4.2.

Taking into consideration that you are doing the same things in marketing, getting the same link click prices, which do you think will be able to outcompete another?

Of course, the latter. By a considerable margin!

And in this client's case, the funnel was spectacular and beating the majority of competitors even before our CRO Lead got his hands on it.

Now I'm going to share 7 essential tips that created an unfair advantage in this client's case.
Tip #1 - Create landing page experience based on NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)
Another thing to drastically boost up your Revenue per Session and CR is by enhancing the landing page experience. This means having a more extended page and more in-depth explanations about the product.

This works because only a small portion of people are ready to buy straight out of the box and need convincing.

There are usually 3 elements a proper landing page should cover.
  • Emotional – this is the first element aiming to create a “hype” around your product and excite then with colors, sounds, and attractive imagery. Based on research about psychology, it usually resonates with about 70% of the world’s population and primarily affects our “reptilian brain”. This is why you want to put this at the top of the landing page.
  • Logical – Another 30% of people need even more convincing with facts & logical reasons for them to buy the product. For example, how much they will save over the long term using your solution or how it’s better than something else. It's perfect for the middle of the page.
  • Trust – The last part affects everybody. It’s pretty self-explanatory with reviews, trust-building, refund guarantees, etc. Removing risk for people and last walls of resistance at the end of the page.And in fact, this is the best structure to follow for a landing page. You start with emotions and hooks, justify their purchase with logic, build trust, and remove objections and risks.
And in fact, this is the best structure to follow for a landing page. You start with emotions and hooks, justify their purchase with logic, build trust, and remove objections and risks.
Tip #2 - Stack your emotional & logical sides of brain triggering reviews
We all know the importance of reviews - they are social proof, which shows that you offer a product that people want and enjoy.

But more often than not, they're used as an afterthought, and just glued onto a random section of the website.

We suggest doing the opposite and making them an integral part of your landing page.

Stacking reviews in multiple places on the page can help to boost your CR drastically.

These are a few places that we usually see work well:

Title:  
The review on here ought to trigger emotions to catch attention, as people need to be hooked and curious about the product. An example could be: "Whenever I wear it, I get showered with compliments!"

Below ATC: At this point, the potential customer is curious about the prospect and is perhaps even considering it.

But as they play around with the idea of buying the product, they will have some doubts creep into their minds. The review here ought to give a bit of credibility, address their concerns and common issues, and resolve them in a satisfactory way.

A good example could be "I'm a [makeup] fanatic and I really like this one! It goes on smoothly and it doesn't clump. I love that it's animal cruelty-free too!!"

In such a review, the user is highlighting several things:
  • "I'm a [makeup] fanatic and I really like this one..." establishes authority within the community and lends the brand credibility.
  • "It goes on smoothly and it doesn't clump" satisfactorily addresses common issues with similar products.
  • "I love that it's animal cruelty-free too!" talks about people's concerns in a positive way.
Below ATC's in landing page: In this area, you would ideally like to place organic/influencer reviews of your products - this lends your brand credibility as you show that your products are loved even in spaces that you don't directly control.

Bottom of the page: By now, the potential audience is likely to be interested in the sale. But is looking for a broader range of opinions of the products. As such, this section is meant to highlight regular reviews that are casual, and don't need to be picture perfect.

They can mention positive and negative aspects of the product; as this honesty will be positively perceived by an audience that has grown jaded from perfect five-star reviews everywhere.

Try to keep the sum total of the comments within the reviews in the range of 80% good and 20% bad though.

In essence, reviews should be focused on answering problems and concern that people will face in their buying and decision-making process
Tip #3 - Hide navigation menu & footer to remove distractions
It seems strange, right?

But just by hiding a navigation menu & footer on the product pages people land on, you can see conversion rate increase by 10-15%.

It’s because you don’t want to give people the option to wander, get lost into your website, and delay the purchase.

You can think about hiding the menu as taking a visitor by their hand and gently leading them step-by-step through a meticulously planned funnel.
Tip #4 - Estimate delivery times so people would not have to think

This is a small little thing that does wonders. Just install an “Estimated Delivery to XXX by XX” widget.

It will give people who need the product right now a good understanding of when they can expect their delivery without them having to go look for this info elsewhere.
Tip #5 - Stack your "resistance crushing" guarantees
There are doubts that even good reviews cannot address.

Sure, those people loved the product, but would I like it if I bought it?

This is where the guarantees are useful, as they can bridge people’s expectations with reality. In this way, even people who are not entirely sure about the purchase can go through with it.

The typical ones are “money-back guaranteed”, or extended return policy of 30-60 days, and so on.

Notice how they can stack on each other - the money-back guarantee can use the extended return policy, to build on each other’s value and make it seem foolish not to try out the product, as there is nothing to lose!

You want to include the guarantees in a visible place, preferably also near the buy button.

Human touch can go a long way
as well, so it helps to have a support email near the guarantees so that potential customers can address their concerns directly.

As a rule of thumb, you should also include a big guarantee stack at the bottom of the page, as extra insurance to alleviate any final doubts.
Tip #6 - Add sticky ATC button to increase
clickthrough rates by 15-25%

The term might initially seem scary and odd, but think about it as a small, unintrusive pop-up button at the bottom of the screen that gives you the option to buy the product that you’re thinking about getting instantly.

It seems quite complicated at first glance, but it’s a very easy thing to add to the website, which you can do via Shopify.

It’s amazing how much it improves conversion, considering how little effort it takes - on average, it increases a site’s conversion rate by 15-25%.

You can also adapt it if you have multiple products on offer.
You can program it so that you have a button that takes you back to a display selector with all the options.
Tip #7 - Do not forget Carthook to create irresistible upsells that maximize average order value
This is another one of those small eCommerce ‘hacks’ with the potential to change your business profitability completely.

This Shopify plugin
is able to override the default checkout screen and allows you to design one specifically for your eCommerce company.

Also, instead of the default “Thank You!” page customers would usually get with the Shopify platform, you can use it for a post-purchase upsell.

In other words, after someone has input all their data, credit card info, etc., and already bought something, instead of a thank you page, they get presented with an add-on promotion for a related product at a discount.

This typically improves revenue by 5-12%, and the beautiful part is that as opposed to other upselling methods, this doesn’t cause friction.

Typically, upselling adds further obstacles and decisions to your potential customers. This can overwhelm or distract them and stop them from making any decision at all. Thus lowering your conversion rate.

But Carthook only targets those who have already purchased, so they have already spent the money which would have otherwise been in danger of being lost due to potential drop in conversion rate.

In other words, any sales via this method usually are pure profit with no downside!
Ramping up Facebook Ads – What It Takes to Get to Wildly Profitable $50-55k Daily Ad Spend Days?
In the past, it used to be normal to have very complicated setups with hundreds of manually arranged ads and campaigns. Nowadays, it’s the other way around, as Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence has improved a lot.

By this point, Facebook knows your secrets - for example, if you're a woman, it can tell whether you’re pregnant or even your menstrual cycle phase based on your browsing behavior changes!

Every single time you interact with a website that has a Facebook widget, you’re sending Facebook information it can then use to target you more effectively (how quickly you're changing websites, what type of posts are you engaging with, how long do you stop the scroll for on particular posts, etc.)

No person would be able to track and use this information in any meaningful way, but the algorithms can!

So what you want to do is select very broad audiences and allow Facebook itself to optimize and work its magic.

By “very broad audiences” what we specifically mean is 10% Look-Alikes (LAL), Interest groups with +50M, sometimes even with no targeting (basically just selecting the country, and maybe gender and age range) and you just let it run.

In the past, there was no way this would have worked, but now it’s far more effective than manually targeting and arranging campaigns.

The caveat though, is that you do need to have some data behind the product, usually around 1000 purchases. This information will then allow you to scale further because Facebook will continuously find new people to show your ads to.

Having new audiences to show your ads to is very important as only 1% of your target demographic is likely to be a potential customer.

The problem though, is the remaining 99% of your target audience might sour on trying your products because they get ad fatigue.

So you want to cycle through many different creatives and sales angles.

You can learn more about it in our previous case study -
https://adkings.agency/case-study-150-250k-to-862k/
Leverage holidays and special occasions
Christmas, Black Friday, Valentine’s, etc. are ideal moments to reframe the products offers.

We’ve seen fantastic results from clients who incorporate such a strategy, wherein it’s not uncommon to see a 25%-30% boost in revenue.

Given that these holidays often momentarily change consumer behavior by making them likelier to purchase things they might not have ever bought before, it’s a perfect moment to target cold audiences.

Don’t be afraid to experiment and run different ads with varied copies
- we’ve tested 20-30 ad copies to find few ones resonating with the audiences we’re targeting.

However, this can easily get unwieldy, and if you want to manage your audiences better, then you need more options up your sleeve.
Use multiple Facebook pixels to separate high sales products or offers
A Facebook Pixel is a tracking tool that you can put on your site. It gives you the option to retarget your website visitors with Facebook ads. But if you’re pushing extremely high volume like in this client's case - you can take it one step further with a Shopify plugin called Trackify.

It will allow you to merge various Facebook pixels, add more pixel events and data, and increase efficiency it collects and splits data.

With this tool, you can have one main pixel, which tracks users, but then also have “sub-pixels,” which are only triggered when a potential customer has interacted with a specific portion of the site.

The combined information of the various pixels will allow you to target broader than you could otherwise. It allows you to find LAL’s (lookalike audiences) to the type of audience already showing interest in specific products.

For this particular customer, we were managing 4 different pixels, which allowed us to scale up further and create a very personalized LAL’s for specific products.

Similarly, you can use multiple Facebook Pages to advertise from. For example, if you are advertising a makeup product, you can advertise from your brand page, then go broader to a makeup page, and so on. This allows you to differentiate your targeting from different sources.

You also diminish “audience burnout”, by making each page feature slightly different ads. As such, even if the same person sees a different advert for a product, they won’t get frustrated with a specific brand or page, as easily.
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Incorporating Other Marketing Channels Like YouTube Ads and Google Ads Alongside Facebook Ads to Support Acquisition Efforts and Achieve Mindboggling ROAS 87.
When you start using an advertising channel rather heavily, it’s good to diversify across different channels. The first step is always to start with synchronized omni-channel remarketing.

For example, a remarketing strategy on Youtube can lead to, on average, 12-15+ ROAS!     Whereas with Facebook alone, you’d be happy with 4-7 ROAS from remarketing.

Then you can stack even more advertising channels like Google Adwords Brand Search Keyword + other remarketing campaigns on top, and you can easily push remarketing ROAS to 42 and beyond just like we did with this client.

A profitable channel can fund the development of another, and then another. Every conquest being easier than the last.

That is a part of AdKings "Everest" eCommerce Growth Framework!

After you nail down remarketing it’s the perfect time to start experimenting with prospecting and use this revenue generated through remarketing to fund the exploration.
Incorporating Other Marketing Channels Like YouTube Ads and Google Ads Alongside Facebook Ads to Support Acquisition Efforts and Achieve Mindboggling ROAS 87.
There are way too many “gurus” or “one man agencies” who set unrealistic expectations.

We’ll do the opposite and tell you the truth.

Then you scale this hard - a lot of problems arise.
Cashflow management will become a full-time job
A major problem is cash flow - since a higher percentage of your money is tied to inventory. You have to spend tens of thousands on ads every day and order even more stock.

You would be forgiven in thinking that the cost thereof would immediately be covered by the sales. But when scaling up your payment processors might freeze your accounts, or there might be delays in payments.

On this specific client, their accounts were frozen when they had $100k ready to payout.

This, at that moment, caused us to halt our scaling. Luckily they have managed to solve it in around a week. But in our experience, we’ve seen situations where accounts could be frozen for months.

In other words, there might be some unexpected circumstances, a bottleneck of how fast you can grow.

Given that cash is king, you have to be very careful with your currency reserves. So what you can do is to pay for your advertisements via a 30-90 day delayed credit card payments.

Through this method, you can conserve your cash to order new inventory, with international producers that wouldn’t accept credit cards, while deferring your payment of the advertisements in the future once you have gained revenue from the sales.

You could also opt for a loan - the problem though, it may take far more time to arrange.
Diversifying & choosing strategic manufacturing might save your business one day
Generally speaking, it is a commonplace to have your suppliers in China. But we would like to discourage that practice and instead advise you to base your manufacturing closer to where your business hub is.

Look into producers locally, if possible. The vast majority of the fast scaling American brands we’re seeing tend to have their manufacturing in the US.

Remember, time is money, and if you can get your stock faster than the competition, you will be able to scale up quicker. Even if the margin is smaller on a per-unit cost, you’ll more than make up for it by being able to increase the raw volume of sales 5 times faster.

If it’s impractical from a cost perspective, and you’re based in the US, look into a country like the Dominican Republic, which is cheap but close.

It’s also worth mentioning that if you’re doing well enough, by which we mean over $50k product ad spends per day, you can negotiate to have a fulfillment office within your manufacturer’s warehouses. This can save you time & money.

If you’re unable to negotiate such an arrangement with your partner, you could look into an Amazon fulfillment or third-party logistics companies, which can help you more easily scale up without getting overwhelmed.

Also, once you have a monthly revenue of between $1-2m, don’t grow too dependent on one supplier or fulfillment service. Ideally, go to another country. It might seem counter-intuitive during normal times, but during volatile times, it pays off.

Look at how eCommerce businesses have done during the COVID-19 pandemic. The diversified ones were able to adapt quickly, while many others are going bankrupt as we speak.

The smart way to create diversification is to separate your orders among various companies. You can write code on your website, which automatically decides what fulfillment center and supplier to use so that you can save yourself from those headaches.

Diversification is the name of the game when you’re looking to scale and are playing the long term game.
Prepare to hire a lot of people - quickly
Sometimes when you’re scaling fast, you need to have more people to help out, as it’s otherwise impossible to manage the increasing workload.

In this case, our clients grew so fast they needed to hire over 30 people in under a month, and kudos to them because they managed to rise to the challenge.

But many companies would not be able to do it. They either don’t have the onboarding capacity, or they can’t even find enough qualified applicants in such a short amount of time.

On average, even if you know what you’re doing, only about 50% of the people you hire will be a good fit. So your Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) have to account for this eventuality so you won't get overwhelmed.

Also, if you’re planning to scale up fast, investing into HR expert could be one of the best investment you could make.
You will have to deal with burnout of the audiences and insane creatives demand
Getting back to the advertisement side of things, we were spending somewhere around $55k a day on Facebook ads for our client and reached close to 42M unique users with close to 250M impressions in only two months.

Put differently, each person saw our ads about 6 times. Unsurprisingly ROAS goes down, and typically this is where clients might start getting a bit nervous.

As said before, you should avoid bombarding the same audience with identical ads in short time spans, as it can push them away.

So what you can do is to have variations of the ads so that they’re slightly different. Given the money we were spending per day, we roughly needed 10-15 ad variations per week to keep it fresh.

Of course, this creates a lot of strain on your creatives. In order to successfully run a campaign of this nature, you will need a lot of different video clips and artistic media.

This is why we have partner networks of videographers in the US, Asia, and Europe. In this way, we can ensure our clients get unique footage for every campaign, as well as by leveraging user-generated content via our influencer contacts.

So if you’re planning to scale fast - don’t underestimate the importance of a creative team and network. Alternatively, you can also build it in-house.
So, What's the Trick to Scaling Your eCommerce
Business On a Grand Scale?

In short, the trick to scaling your eCommerce store from $199 821/MO to $3 799 232M/MO in just 2 months is by doing your homework pre-hyper-scaling phase.

This means having your landing page and sales funnel nailed down,
myriad of creatives prepared, having a crystal clear strategy of how you're going to deal with the rapid increase in sales, knowing what people you're going to hire, and most importantly being armed with the best performance media buying skills to give you that edge against competitors.

And it's a lot to know. A lot to do, and a lot to figure out.

You can try to recreate everything by yourself, potentially spending years. Or...

If you're already making at least $100K+ a month, you can book a free 30-min Discovery Call with us and we will be able to figure out your business potential together. The button to do so is below.

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