The Product When we started The 5TH, we only sold our minimal, - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

The Product

When we started The 5TH, we only sold our minimal, unisex watches on the 5th of the month for 5 days. This meant that the rest of the month was spent generating and nurturing leads. While the direct-to-consumer watch space extremely saturated (it seems every man and his dog has a watch company) we were able to difgerentiate ourselves through this limited sales model. The scarcity and exclusivity around only selling for 5 days a month helped to increase perceived value and demand for the product. Consumer Brand

How It Worked

During the month we ran an Instagram infmuencer funnel to capture and warm up leads. The fact we would consistently sell out within the fjrst few hours of sales meant that there was a real consumer need to ‘sign up to our VIP waitlist’ . Once you signed up, you would receive a unique store password which meant you were able to shop 9 hours ahead of the general public to secure your watch before it sold out (which was often within hours, sometimes minutes). The 5th of every month was structured like: a pre-launch 12am) / launch (9am).

In terms of our website experience — for email capture during the month, there was both a website popup capturing emails for our waitlist or a ‘shopping’ experience where the usual ‘SHOP NOW’ CTA on the product was replaced with ‘SIGN UP ’ and you could enter your email then and there. 24 hours before launch the VIP waitlist would be sent the store password and then ‘5 hours to go’ and ‘shop now’ notifjcations.

Come midnight, sales would explode.

The Thought Process Toward Audience /Marketing Strategy

As we didn’t sell throughout the rest of the month, we would measure conversions as new Instagram followers and converting as many of those across to email sign ups throughout the month. Our email leads were much warmer if we converted them from Instagram as we could nurture the leads there fjrst and throughout the month. While The 5TH ’s limited sales model was infmuencing customers on one side, we used infmuencer marketing, at scale, at the same time to would grow our Instagram following and concurrently our email database and sales.

Our website traffjc was a lot warmer as it was largely from social media referrals which meant that our retargeting campaigns converted really well. Our infmuencer budget varied month to month but was usually between $10,000-15,000. We’d also do around 50 gifted send outs a month. We used a combination of paid macro infmuencers targeted at generating followers and sign ups at scale and micro infmuencers geared at content generation.

The Ads That Worked

We used a mix of macro / micro infmuencer posts.

Micro Infmuencers (between 3k-50k) as content creators We would have our content creators submit their content to us via email / Dropbox rather than being required to post the content to their social channels. Using this method we’d get closer to 5-10 edited images per infmuencers rather than one post to their feed. We could then repurpose this content however we liked — on our social channels, our ads, our emails, on our website etc. Often they would end up posting us anyway so it was a win-win. One example included @demasrusli who had closer to 20k followers when we were working with him. These were usually just in return for gifted products, invites to experiences (a night photo shoot we hosted) / events and sometimes we’d keep them on a retainer if their content performed really well.

Macro Infmuencers (50k-3M) for conversions (followers, email subscribers, sales): We’d often run tag + follow to win giveaways to drive new followers, ask them to use strong CTA’s asking their followers to sign up to our VIP waitlist and give personalised discount codes for sales. This post from @helenowen which received 40k likes was simply a brand mention

The Lander/Funnel

Our Instagram Infmuencer funnel: Infmuencer Post → @the5th Instagram → Sign up CTA in bio → Link in bio → Website email capture popup / sign up CTAs on products → Joined waitlist → Welcome email → Store password emailed 24 hours before → 5 hours to go email → Shop now email

The Traffjc

While we had a small advertising budget the majority of our traffjc and conversations came direct from our email database which we’d grow on average around 10,000 emails a month through our infmuencer funnel. As these leads were coming from our infmuencer funnel they were very warm. This meant that our website visitors were also very warm (mostly from social) which meant that when we were running retargeting campaigns the ROI was greater than a factor of 10, and the CPA was only AU$1.66.

The Results

The month before our largest day of sales we made AU$232,448.94 in our fjrst minute of sales with an with an average conversion rate of 18.52%.

I’m unsure why this is signifjcantly lower than what was recorded in Shopify at closer to 90% but likely as the traffjc was far higher than the sales at this point as a lot of people couldn’t humanly check out in 1 minute. The following month, on our fjrst birthday, we recorded our biggest ever day of sales ever at over $1 million with an average conversion rate of over 12%.

Key Factors of Success

This ‘two-sided infmuence’ was our main growth mechanism. By two-sided infmuence, I mean the way in which we were able to use factors like scarcity and exclusivity through our limited sales model to infmuence our customer experience, while at the same time using social infmuencers to infmuence on our brand’s behalf.

Learnings

Product design and features aren’t the only point that you can difgerentiate a brand in a crowded market. Psychological factors like scarcity and exclusivity can act as UVPs for your brand to increase perceived value and demand. As my boyfriend says, “you sell the sizzle not the sausage” .

What to do Difgerent Next Time

If we could have, we would have been producing and releasing a new / limited edition watch every month to accompany our limited sales model. This would have made it make more sense to our customers than simply selling the same stock each month for a limited amount of time. The reason we weren’t yet able to do this was because we were still a relatively new company and due to the lead time in development of watches we were never ahead of the manufacturing process enough to allow for this. Now we release a limited edition watch with only 500 pieces each month. The fjrst time we dropped our limited edition watch it sold out in 46 minutes.

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