Breaking Down the Strategies of a High-Performing Asian Online Retailer

An online retailer of Asian-oriented products, including skincare, stationery, authorized merchandise, and some really cute plushies.

The products basically sell themselves (seriously, those plushies!), and they enjoy high rates of return customers and organic sales. But the company wanted more incoming traffic, and a higher customer lifetime value (CLV).

The challenge: because of intense competition from discount retailers like YesStyle and Soko Glam, they had to be cautious and limit their advertising budget.

The Solution

It’s great when my clients can have all their problems solved by one brilliant, all-encompassing solution. But they already had a solid business: there were no glaring weak points. To make big improvements, we needed a multi-pronged plan of attack.

Here’s what I did:

• Incentivized first-timers: to prevent shopping cart abandonment and speed up conversion, we offered 10 percent off first-time orders.

• Rewarded return buyers: to increase our CLV, we focused on loyalty. Buyers with high order values earned free rewards. Meanwhile, old purchases who hadn’t purchased within three months would receive specially targeted ads.

• Started with best-sellers: as the brand grew, its inventory had become massive — so we went through and identified which products did best at drawing in customers.

• Made a lifestyle pitch: cheap Chinese products are hard to compete with. In our advertising, we changed the focus to a cozy, reliable lifestyle brand. For instance, we clearly highlighted how some products would improve a buyer’s health through their impact on serotonin.

• And put it close to home: since many of those competitors also had to send their products from China, we began highlighting our fast, free shipping within North America. They simply couldn’t compete!

Finally, here’s how all of those efforts added up:

• With a new average CPA of $14.44, we were able to grow ad spend to $370,000 in a ten month period

• During this time, our return on ad spend also increased to 6.17x, and our conversion rate on paid ads grew to a healthy 3.24 percent

• As a result, we generated over $2.4M million in net sales!