North Star Digital
Imagine having the luxury of hotel bedding in the comfort of your own home. That’s exactly what SleepHappy delivers to its customers.
As the retail arm of DreamMaster, a leading European brand that manufactures premium bedding for the biggest hotel chains (including Marriott, Accor and many more), SleepHappy is positioned as the “only manufacturer in South East Asia that produces and roll-packs their entire mattress collection.”
SleepHappy had all the convenience and portability of its bedding, competitive pricing, free shipping, several positive reviews online and a large range of luxury locally-manufactured mattresses. It was amazing set up that would put its competitors to shame.
Despite having their cash cow ready, SleepHappy was still not getting enough conversions online.
What was going wrong?
SleepHappy’s audience needed reassurance before purchasing. Thai customers—the brand’s primary market—typically look around for a product online, message for more information and THEN convert on either the website or in-store.
And with Thailand’s thousands of e-commerce companies competing for consumer attention, it’s a massive achievement that we were able to drive a 183% increase in SleepHappy’s monthly sales in 4 months, purely with Facebook ads!
Let’s walk through how we achieved this and several other big wins for SleepHappy, and how you can apply these learnings to your business too.
We concluded with the SleepHappy team early on that the primary goal was to drive sales through getting high-quality leads.
And as the website did not convert well—especially for a planned purchase—it was clear that the focus needed to be on getting as many high-quality messages (leads) on Facebook, at the lowest cost possible.
We thus needed to create and execute a strategy that could profitably increase their online sales revenue, while decreasing the overall cost per message.
We identified and worked to understand these 3 major challenges to SleepHappy’s growth:
1. New company, new market
SleepHappy was a brand new company with an innovative offer, so they needed to create brand awareness. Although there were several messages from interested customers, barely any of these converted into paying customers at first. SleepHappy had to first gain the audience’s trust.
2. No in-house team
Being a small company, there was no in-house team to handle their online marketing. They needed to increase sales, but could not go through the financial and time-based risk of hiring their own high-performing in-house marketing team.
3. Did not see results with other agencies
SleepHappy had engaged a digital agency previously but had trouble hitting the required sales KPIs. While they had created good posts with strong engagement, increased their Facebook page’s likes and received numerous messages, nothing led to a notable increase in sales. It just wasn’t a worthwhile investment.
Here’s how we approached SleepHappy’s challenges:
1. A Simplified, Effective Strategy with Congruent KPIs
Most companies’ sales-based marketing strategies fail because they are too complex to actually execute. The truth is when you measure too many metrics (comments, shares, messages, clicks, impressions etc.) at the same time, it’s so easy to lose focus on actually getting more sales.
We needed a clear focus on 1 KPI that could tell us very early on whether our marketing efforts were pushing in the right direction. For SleepHappy, we made the strategic decision to only focus on the sales funnel via messages.
Messages generally have a higher chance of converting. Yes, replying to all of them is extremely tedious and time-consuming. But every emerging business must take this challenge on gratefully.
You’ll get to learn so much more about who your potential customers are, AND you’ll get sales while you build these meaningful relationships with your audience. Win-win!
With SleepHappy we measured the number of messages against the number of sales, weekly. Our Strategists, Copywriters and Designers were all on-boarded towards working to decrease the cost and increasing the amount of messages.
2. Paid Ads on Facebook – Performance Marketing
Our Facebook marketing campaigns’ main KPI was to reduce the cost per message from 276 THB to below 100 THB/message. It was SleepHappy’s team’s job, to convert these messages into sales; We would then consult them on how to improve conversion rates. Our job was to get as many qualified messages as possible.
This strategic solution was crucial, as:
In 1 month, we managed to lower the cost down to 91 THB per message, and increased online sales revenue by 183.3% in 4 months! We also doubled the number of leads under the same budget.
This proved that SleepHappy’s audience needed to ask questions before spending money on their bed of choice. Optimizing for messages streamlined the process of getting potential customers to the internal sales execs, where they worked their magic from there.
We openly communicated with SleepHappy’s team to ensure they were getting high-quality messages. We combined this sales-focused approach with an A/B testing plan to truly understand which creatives and audiences worked and which didn’t.
3. Influencer Marketing
SleepHappy had previously rolled out their own influencer marketing by introducing a famous Thai actor to present their beds. And we immediately asked to use those videos for Facebook marketing.
The testimonial videos were an indispensable asset to use on Facebook, as video views are the most cost-effective form of engagement on the platform.
We used the videos for cheap video views to increase brand awareness. Then we targeted those who already watched the videos with even more ads to maximize sales.
Here are some of the best performing ads from the influencer campaign, both of which were under the maximum cost per message requirement:
You can see the impact Facebook marketing had on SleepHappy’s sales in the graph below:
Within the first few months of running FB Ads, we saw:
Refined audience targeting also increased sales significantly–especially by using Lookalike audiences of customer databases, but also by targeting university-educated people in relationships. In other words, these are people who want to share beds or have loved ones who could use good beds, and can also afford them.
Re-targeting audiences who had previously messaged the page was most effective, along with a ‘claim your discount’ approach to further incentivize the consumers.
1. Always apply a strategic approach
Choose the highest impact sales funnel with 1 clear KPI, and measure it back to sales. It’s the most simplified way to learn from data.
For SleepHappy, it was messages/cost per message, which we validated with the number of sales.
2. Partner with a local influencer / public figure:
Although it can become costly, partnering with an influencer who resonates well with your target audience is crucial to a new brand’s success.
This doesn’t mean paying for influencers once to get 1 big boost. The short-term growth just isn’t sustainable in the long run. Tie the influencers who work back into your ongoing paid ads strategy to ensure your product/service gets fresh content regularly.
Another clear benefit of influencer marketing is that one collection of footage is usable in multiple ad formats. If the videos don’t work well, you can always re-purpose the influencer ad as an image, a photo album, carousel and more.
SleepHappy has huge potential for growth online as a rising e-commerce business. At present they’re pushing forward with several customer reviews and videos of people trying out their products.
In the short, medium, and long term, the future is bright for SleepHappy and the thousands of people who can now, sleep happy.
