UK Dessert Brand: $1.25M Revenue in 2020 and 303% Year-over-Year Growth

The challenge

This brand had proven product-market fit with influencer campaigns and early Facebook tests, but it could not get past £20K a month. Its constraints were:

• Refrigerated shipping kept it in the UK and limited the choice of fulfilment partners, so growth had to come from finding more buyers in one market.
• A premium price compared with supermarket desserts. That let us outspend competitors, but it narrowed the audience, and the ads had to build real desire to justify the price.
• The fulfilment centre’s software blocked many of the Shopify apps we normally use to lift AOV and conversion rate.
• High Facebook CPMs relative to AOV and lifetime value, which made profitable ROAS at scale hard.

What we did

Creative first. We shipped product to in-house creative teams in the UK and Ireland, filmed natural-looking video (polished production wasn’t needed), and gathered UGC through influencers. ROAS doubled as soon as the original videos went live. We set a weekly creative-testing schedule and analysed which creative traits predicted performance.

Facebook Ads. For a low-cost product, retargeting rarely pays, so we simplified it, moved most of the budget to prospecting, and grouped retargeting audiences into large pools. We tested more than 50 audiences, then tested the campaign structure element by element over long periods:

• ABO beat CBO, small ad-set budgets beat large ones, broad and lookalike audiences beat interests, and automatic placements beat hand-picked ones.
• UGC video with text overlay and GIFs beat every other format (static, testimonial, dynamic product ads). One or two copy variants beat all others, so we changed only the tagline for each promotion.
• A fresh batch of creatives every two weeks was the best pace for scaling spend profitably.

Facebook ROAS ran between 2.5x and 5x, depending on the month.

Google Ads. We started with brand search, then cold search terms tested across broad, phrase and exact match. We tested several Shopping product groupings until one scaled, and ran it at a loss until it built momentum. Google averaged 6.89x ROAS at about $15K a month.

Snapchat Ads. We ran single-story UGC video and GIF ads to cold gender-based broad audiences and to several remarketing segments. A younger 13–25 audience worked best. AOV was slightly lower than on Facebook, and promotions beat evergreen campaigns. Snapchat averaged 3.11x ROAS at over £10K a month and delivered 40% of revenue.

Email. Every month we sent at least one promotion and three content emails (recipes and fun content), plus automations. Purchase-triggered competitions (“buy X and enter to win Y”) beat flat discounts, which hurt margin, and giveaways, which grew the list but not sales. They worked especially well at Christmas. Email reached over 20% of revenue.

Results

• $1.25M revenue in 2020 (£911,021.24)
• 303% year-over-year growth
• 40% of revenue from Snapchat (3.11x ROAS at over £10K a month)
• Google Ads at 6.89x ROAS at about $15K a month
• Over 20% of revenue from email
• Facebook ROAS of 2.5x to 5x, after original video creatives doubled ROAS

The owners could finally step back from production and focus on strategy. They went on to plan a rebrand, a wider product line and a move into retail.