+86% YoY sales growth for a cosmetics eCom

Growth objective

Growing a new brand within the crowded skincare industry is a challenge, and requires getting through the complicated learning curve of developing your product, service and sales. Nonetheless, connecting directly with your customer base through your own ecommerce store, and owning your own customer data, offers clear opportunities for great products to grow.

After analysing their results 2020, Laponie understood that while their existing customers were happy with the products, their main growth bottleneck was acquiring new customers through marketing. Results from marketing thus far had been lackluster with an unsatisfactory yield.

As Truly joined Laponie’s growth effort, we started by establishing an ambitious growth objective, aiming for an overall 50% YoY revenue increase in 2021, and a 125% revenue growth from advertising. One of the objectives was also to improve customer loyalty and lifetime value.

How we got there

Laponie’s growth strategy was focused around the idea that for a quality product with clear benefits, getting the first purchase would be the most difficult one, and repeat purchases would  be much more easy to acquire once users got to adequately experience the quality of the products.

Following this strategy, we started testing various acquisition tactics in different channels. We soon learned that there are several messaging angles that seem to provide promising results. On one hand there were messages that communicated the core values of Laponie – on the other hand discount and seasonal campaigns seemed to drive first time purchases as well.

Focusing on discount tactics in the beginning was a conscious gamble in an industry very much driven by brand building. The thinking behind this approach was that the quality of the products themselves is the main brand building element, and increasing the size of their direct customer base and CRM would help increase customer lifetime value in the following months.

Our growth hacking process executed through weekly growth sprints provided valuable learnings, and as the year progressed we eventually started seeing huge increases in all relevant sales metrics.

Key learnings

Consistency is key when acquiring new users and retaining them. What may seem like a risky strategy that is not translating at first will work out eventually if you’re consistent in following it, even though it may take months.

When scaling quickly, brand perception may need to take a short-term hit in order to bring in more first-time customers. It’s important to find balance in having an appealing offer vs not spoiling your customers rotten.

Quickly changing tactics when needed was also one key success factor here. Analysing data we were able to discover and utilise a shift in consumer desire for our initial discount driven tactics to more informational and benefit-focused content.

‍