Case Study: Performance Marketing Drives 85% Revenue Growth for Pish Posh Baby

About Pish Posh Baby

Pish Posh Baby is a well-known omnichannel retailer that sells a wide range of high quality baby and parenting products in the USA. Based in New York and with a store in Lakewood, New Jersey, they came to Swanky with ambitious plans to rebrand, replatform and quickly grow their ecommerce business. You can read about how the rebrand and replatforming project delivered an almost instant 68% uplift in conversions here.

This article looks at the next step in the growth of Pish Posh Baby and how Swanky’s performance marketing services delivered impressive growth in the first six months post-launch, specifically around Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM).

The challenge

The rebrand and launch of their Shopify Plus store was the start of a new chapter for Pish Posh Baby, one aimed at achieving significant ecommerce growth. The target was to increase their year-on-year ecommerce sales by 50% within the first three months of working with us. With the new infrastructure in place, the Swanky Growth Accelerator team delivered a multifaceted approach to achieve this.

In particular, one of the team’s key performance indicators (KPIs) was to utilise the opportunity of BFCM to deliver the target 49% year-on-year revenue growth in November. With several brand deals in negotiation and limited stock products arriving exclusively with Pish Posh Baby, the market opportunity looked strong.

The solution

The Growth Accelerator team referred to the learnings gained from the redesign and replatforming Swanky had carried out for Pish Posh Baby to understand more about the target audience, their buying habits and their interactions with the brand.

It became clear that the strategy needed to not only drive repeat and upsell purchases from existing customers, but also attract new customers to the brand.

The team devised a multi-channel performance marketing strategy with a singular focus – generating significant revenue growth. Secondary KPIs were employed to determine the success of individual channels at various funnel points, but the key bottom-of-funnel metric was revenue. The BFCM buying period obviously presented an opportunity to reach both new and returning customers at a time when the propensity to purchase is higher than usual.

The campaign was delivered across paid social, organic social, paid search and email marketing channels, with each playing a role in the wider campaign. Let’s look at what the team did for some of these areas.

Paid search advertising (PPC)

PPC activities were focused on Google Ads, as this platform provided the largest market share for reaching the target audience. Display, Search and Shopping ads were all employed to do different jobs at different stages of the buying funnel.

The team focused on three key strategies on this channel:

1. Stock keeping unit (SKU) specific and product group focus
2. Time and season
3. Customer focused ad copies

#1 SKU specific and product group focus

The team created ads and ad groups to deliver specific messages related to each unique category of product – for example, strollers and travel systems. This meant users could be targeted by their specific interests.

With display ads, our SKU specific targeting strategy leveraged the power of placement and interest targeting to reach the users who were more likely to convert. This helped to generate a much better conversion rate for customers who clicked on the ad, which in turn meant a higher return on investment for Pish Posh Baby’s ad spend.

#2 Time and season

The team was proactively responsive to any changes in times and seasonalities during the BFCM week. By constantly tweaking and updating our messaging, we were able to address user expectations and keep brand communication relevant and visible throughout the BFCM season.

#3 Customer focused ad copies

The wording of each advert was crafted and designed with the customers in mind. By focusing our messaging less on product features and instead highlighting the benefits to the customer, we were able to create an appeal and position products for maximum sales.

Email marketing

• Data-led approach
• Product/SKU focus
• Adopted more text in campaigns
• Scheduling

As with our PPC campaign, the email marketing team ran a campaign focused on driving revenue, using a product led approach.

We started early with broad messaging across our audience segments, to raise awareness of the campaign among as many people as possible. The early emails included several big recognisable brand names as well as highlighting the advantages of Pish Posh Baby’s loyalty program.

Having announced brand sales to a broader audience, Swanky’s email strategists then reviewed customer behaviour data and retargeted recipients who had not yet made a purchase.

Finally, towards the end of the campaign, the team sent last chance emails which promoted more brands per email. These targeted recipients who had not made a purchase but had demonstrated interest in a relevant sale item.

This approach of starting broad and narrowing down the segments helped to optimise conversion opportunities through more relevant, targeted messaging as the campaign continued.

Paid and organic social

Across both paid and organic social channels, Swanky introduced incremental sales during the lead up to BFCM. The ‘early access’ sale ran over 10 days, with new products and discounts being added on a daily basis. All remaining sales went live on the Wednesday before BFCM.

Throughout BFCM weekend itself, the team offered daily highlights to Pish Posh’s social followers, as well as on paid channels. By segmenting audiences and using specific retargeting messages, we were able to increase the impact of our campaigns, by optimising our communication based on customer behaviour and the products that were featured.

In addition, the social media team ran a campaign that offered users double loyalty points on each purchase they made over BFCM weekend. This aimed not only to incentivise purchasing during this weekend, but to encourage a more long term loyalty to the brand.

Future campaigns can look to capitalise further by incentivising users to spend the points they earned over the weekend, driving up the number of returning customers and repeat purchases.

The results

The collaboration of Swanky’s specialists in PPC, social and email marketing resulted in a carefully planned and well-executed campaign that far exceeded the revenue growth target.

Comparing November 2021 vs November 2020, total revenue increased by 85%, far above the brand’s target of 50%.

In particular, email revenue soared, increasing by 206% year-on-year. Paid ads saw similar success, with an increase of 128% revenue compared to the previous November.

During the main sale period of BFCM, the campaign generated 48% of the monthly revenue, with 34% of this generated by paid ads.

Our team looks forward to continuing their work with Pish Posh Baby in the future, drawing on learnings to further fine tune and optimise our marketing strategies for them.

Is performance marketing right for your brand?

Do you have a brand that you think could benefit from a performance marketing strategy from the Swanky experts? We’d love to talk about the growth potential with you, so get in touch.