Bump Boxes, which offers pregnancy and baby products to expectant mothers via subscription boxes, has leveraged AI to drive its Facebook and Instagram campaigns, improve audience targeting and build out creative campaigns suited to its shoppers. In June and July 2019, using a solution from AI-driven digital ad software company Pattern89, Bump Boxes saw:
- Purchase volume increase 49%;
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) decrease 30%; and
- Alerts cut some ad costs as much as 50%.
These results point up the effectiveness of the Bump Boxes social campaign, especially since they reaffirmed its near-immediate success. Through Facebook and Instagram, Bump Boxes decreased ad spend by 50% and increased purchases by 25% in two weeks.
Leland Deehring, Co-Founder and CIO of Bump Boxes, noted that the technology addresses a major challenge for marketers: creative fatigue. Marketers often can make the mistake of not reacting fast enough if a campaign goes on too long, or if certain aspects of the visual or text side are overused. When not addressed, creative fatigue can cause CPA for a campaign to rise over time.
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“Our success is based on trying a lot of new things, making decisions quickly on what works and what doesn’t work, killing the things that don’t work and then setting up the next test,” said Deehring in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. Deehring co-founded the business with his wife, Christine, when they were expecting their first child. The company launched its first box in 2015, with a standard Bump Box subscription now costing $32 per month over 12 months.
Bump Boxes Sees Benefits Of Audience Targeting, Refined Messaging
When implementing an AI-driven solution to optimize its Facebook and Instagram ads, Bump Boxes sought answers to several questions:
- What audience targeting adjustments can be made to drive conversions for this brand?
- What creative concepts — such as colors, photography and copy — will lead to higher engagement with potential customers?
- Can alerts identified by AI be implemented quickly and easily?
To create the campaigns, Pattern89 analyzed more than 2,900 dimensions — including imagery, video length, syntax and targeting — of every ad Bump Boxes has ever run, and compared those dimensions to billions of other advertiser data points to discover what aspects of each ad needed to be changed.
“This partnership has fit really well because it has allowed us to refine our messaging,” Deehring said. “It allows us to understand what type of verbiage is resonating with our audience of moms, and it allows us to optimize our creative, even the emojis and call-to-action, in a much faster manner than before. Even though we’re in a niche — there’s only four million new moms per year — we also are marketing to the gift buyers, the partners, the grandparents and the friends of friends. Our reach is actually much greater than you’d expect.”
From there, Bump Boxes takes the lessons from the best-performing advertisements on Facebook and Instagram and bases its new campaigns on the individual factors that work best.
The insights also have helped Bump Boxes take a more sophisticated approach to its overall marketing efforts. “We have multiple campaigns running,” Deehring said. “Each campaign has different types of ad sets and different types of audiences. We’re not treating all of our audiences the same way, so we’re finding and adjusting what the max amount of tolerance is per CPA so that we can optimize for each audience. That’s been a shift in our thinking. Historically, we’ve always thought of our CPA as being a ‘blended’ CPA (based on an average, or an estimated CPA range), but I think there’s a lot of room to decrease and increase CPA targets in certain areas to capture a much larger audience.”
