Founded in 2010, Express Medals started as a small CPG business selling a large variety of products for sports leagues, events, and other occasions. Initially running operations out of a basement, they have since grown to manage over 40,000 SKUs across 80 categories, relying heavily on Amazon for revenue generation.
Challenge: Maximizing the Profitability of the Full Catalog
With a vast catalog, it became difficult for Express Medals to conduct deep dives on individual SKUs or categories to inform their advertising strategy. To maximize profitability, they needed a scalable solution that could provide insights into their entire marketing funnel, support ad execution, and drive sustainable growth.
Their first hurdle was identifying the parts of their catalog that weren’t effectively reaching New-to-Brand (NTB) customers. This wasn’t feasible through Amazon’s platform alone, as examining items on a product-by-product basis was impractical. Express Medals needed a solution to group products and reveal insights into NTB and repeat purchase dimensions, making it easier to manage ad spending strategically.
Once generating NTB sales and grouping products into categories, they also wanted a solution that could help grow repeat purchases at an even faster pace to support long-term profitability. They felt that a technology that could help them leverage Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) and Amazon’s Demand-Side Platform (DSP) ads as well as Sponsored Display ads would be essential.
They needed a scalable way to make data-driven decisions that would balance new customer acquisition with sustainable growth and profitability.
Solution: Multi-Pronged Integrated Software
Express Medals needed a multi-faceted solution that combined shopper insights with ad automation to gain visibility into high-value areas of their catalog and streamline campaign execution.
Shopper Insights Powered By Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC)
Through AMC’s clean room solution, Trellis’ Shopper Insights was able to help Express Medals to effectively identify the products and categories that were fueling their growth, as well as finding opportunities that were under-utilized.
Our strategy consisted of:
- Finding products that generated New-To-Brand sales
- Redistributing budget to products with NTB potential that were under-utilized because of their high ACoS
- Surfacing and leveraging product combinations that fueled repeat purchases and long-term profitability
To generate additional NTB sales and to fuel growth, Shopper Insight Analytics through AMC surfaces important advertising data, Brand Analytics data, and historical sales data to distinguish NTB (New-to-Brand) purchases separately from repeat purchases using a 12-month repeat purchase cycle. AMC allows us to historically track the user’s relationship with the brand so that we can surface every touchpoint, sale, and dollar that is used to generate new and repeat sales.
This helped Express Medals to identify which products acquire new customers, allowing them to prioritize their ad spend accordingly. In the past, products with higher ACoS would get overlooked, but we realized that some products are the most effective at acquiring new customers. Understanding that a new customer is often more expensive to acquire than an old one and the potential for long-term profitability through repeat purchases, we redistributed our budget to these.
To further focus our budgets, Shopper Insights allows sellers to surface repeat purchase frequencies, and the lifetime value (LTV) of NTB customers. By getting a better grasp on the product lifecycle, we were able to advertise to previous customers through additional ad types, like Amazon DSP and Display, generating additional repeat purchases throughout the year.
Ads Automation
Shopper Insights surfaces a significant amount of opportunity for CPG brands like Express Medals. While many brands can leverage this AMC data on their own, to take full advantage of their huge product line, they needed additional software functionality to automate the implementation and optimization of ads.
Leveraging Sponsored Product ads not only were they able to drive traffic to products with some of the highest NTB sales, but they were able to do it more cost effectively through algorithmic optimization. Our ads automation platform assisted with an intricate campaign structure to take advantage of some of the most profitable keywords while introducing keyword harvesting to continue to find new opportunities. The ads automation software then monitored shifts in CPCs, conversion rates, and ACoS daily to adjust bids, maintaining the efficiency of driving those NTB sales.
To further drive brand growth, Express Medals was able to leverage DSP and Display ads to remarket to these New-To-Brand customers, focusing on categories with high repeat purchases rates. By driving NTB sales cost efficiently and leveraging more ad types to fuel repeat purchases, Trellis helped improve Express Medals’ overall LTV and customer acquisition cost (CAC).
Results
In just five months, Express Medals saw dramatic improvements: a 119% increase in weekly NTB growth and a 237% increase in weekly sales, exceeding their original growth targets. Monthly repeat sales surged by 428%, reinforcing the impact of a targeted NTB strategy combined with effective retention efforts. The realignment of their ad budget led to an 18% reduction in ACoS and a 10% decrease in TACoS, demonstrating how these integrated tools streamlined their ad efficiency.
With their category insights through AMC and automation in place, Express Medals plans to expand its DSP budget further, leveraging low-cost impressions and page views to build sustainable brand growth. On a solid foundation, Express Medals is now positioned to continue scaling, guided by data-driven insights and an efficient ad strategy.
Between launching new strategies and implementing comprehensive technologies, Express Medals is set up to innovate based on business needs and market conditions. To support, we continue to roll out new product improvements and features, like our AMC-powered Path to Purchase, Dynamic Pricing, and Shopify Integrations.
Want a look at the future of selling on Amazon, schedule a call with us here: https://gotrellis.com/book-a-demo/