Case Study
Wpromote partnered with Soft Surroundings to leverage paid and earned media to achieve key business objectives across both ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retail, looking to take advantage of Wpromote’s strategic partnerships for access to first-to-market platform capabilities and tech.
Their Story
Soft Surroundings is a women’s apparel company on a mission to give women a way to take a moment out of their busy lives and be good to themselves with soft, comfortable, and exclusive designs. The company started as a catalog in 1999 and has now grown to 80+ retail locations.
The Challenge
Soft Surroundings partnered with Wpromote to increase customer retention, improve scalability across digital channels, and, ultimately, drive in-store and e-commerce revenue in a competitive industry.
The Solution
Google: AI-Powered Ad Options, From Shopping to Local Campaigns
As one of the first advertisers to test out and implement Google’s AI-powered ad capabilities, Soft Surroundings was focused on more than just ranking well in traditional search engine results. This new tech opened up more options and formats for the brand, so Wpromote’s experts could diversify Soft Surroundings’ Google ad placements, including across Shopping, Local Inventory, and Dynamic Product Display, and open up eligibility for those ads on the Google Search Network, Display Network, YouTube, and Gmail. The breadth of placements was a huge win in the highly competitive women’s apparel market.
The AI functionality of these campaigns also allowed Soft Surroundings to leverage image assets at scale, an important brand priority.
Wpromote also launched a Smart Local campaign to target in-store shoppers and encourage physical store visits, as well as support omnichannel digital efforts. Launching these campaigns early drove not just online revenue but also boosted visits to physical stores experiencing declining in-store traffic and sales. Wpromote worked with Soft Surroundings to determine which locations were struggling, build the Smart Local campaign strategy, and allocate funds to campaigns specifically supporting those stores. The campaign was also able to help Soft Surroundings support newly opened stores as they continued to expand.
Facebook & Instagram: Stacked Lookalike Audience Targeting & Manual Bidding
Dynamic Ads for Broad Audiences (DABA) on Facebook has been around for several years, but Wpromote worked with Soft Surroundings to test a new tactic using stacked lookalike audience targeting. The new strategy helped Wpromote’s experts scale Soft Surroundings’ campaign spend by over 100% in the last year while increasing purchases by 136% and decreasing CPA by 36%.
The campaign media spend is now double the previous proportion of account spending, increasing Soft Surroundings’ share of voice across Facebook, Instagram, and Audience Network placements.
Wpromote also transitioned the brand from lowest cost (automated) bidding to target cost (manual) bidding in Broad Dynamic Campaigns in order to lower cost-per-acquisition for new customers.
With a 20% decrease in CPA after a test period, Wpromote rolled this strategy out across the entire account to maintain more stringent control of CPAs for the most important demographic groups while freeing up additional funds to test expansion into slightly younger audiences.
Channels + Services
Paid Search
Paid Social
Google Shopping & Marketplaces
Strategy
Adopting New Technologies to Outmaneuver the Competition
Early adoption of new technologies and tactics has given Soft Surroundings the ability to test the curve and outperform its competitors in the market.
