Strategic social ad copy for Sparkinity
Captured your attention with a cute little light-up polar bear? Thought so. It worked like a charm on a remarketing audience for digital retail marketplace, Sparkinity too.
Not all credit goes to the incandescent cutie though. A lot of how we drove performance across a series of A/B Facebook (Meta) tests came down to strategic copywriting and ad copy composed with performance insights leading the way.
Keep scrolling as I illuminate how the words you use on your digital assets can have such a huge impact on your results.
Test00 - Pilot remarketing test
I worked on this client during my time as Copy Lead at growth marketing agency, Ladder.io. When Sparkinity came to us, they were looking to drive more signups to their marketplace, which provides independent retailers and brands with wholesale tech and services designed to boost business growth.
We started with Test00 - a base pilot test retargeting people who had already visited the Sparkinity website but not converted. They were our user segment. Our goal for the campaign was conversion and the measurable metric was new signups.
Based on a hypothesis presented by our in-house team of creative strategists, we prepared to test two different value props (VPs)/key messages:
‘Risk-free (free first orders)’ - because Sparkinity offers free first orders forever as a USP, mitigating risk for brands and retailers looking to try and buy new wholesale products.
‘Curated European brands’ - because Sparkinity provides access to the best unique brands.
We wrote 3x ad variants for each ad group (each VP assigned to its own ad group) - so 6 ads in total formed the campaign.
The results of Test00 showed that:
80% of new signups came from the ‘Risk-free’ VP.
Ad variation 3 (above, left) was the best performer within that VP ad group.
The cost per result for variation 3 was 30% cheaper than the test’s average, also making it the most cost-efficient ad of the whole campaign.
These valuable performance insights then provided us with sound foundational knowledge on which we could then build out the rest of our testing plan. Next up: Test 01 - a Meta conversion test targeting the brand’s key Retailer user segment.
Test01 - Meta conversion test targeted to Retailers
Following Test00, our creative strategists decided to launch two conversion campaigns on Meta (static Facebook ads). Unlike Test00 which retargeted a warm audience of previous website visitors, Test01 and Test02 would target cold audiences.
Retailers were the chosen user segment for Test01, the first of the conversion campaign tests. They were in the conversion stage of the funnel. Our goal was optimising for conversion and our measurable metric was new leads.
The goal of Test01: to understand which message (or VP) best resonated with Test01’s target audience (Retailers).
The two messages we were testing against each other here were:
The same best-performing ‘Risk-free (free orders)’ VP from Test00.
A new VP around the ‘Exclusive selection’ of brands and products.
The results of Test01 showed that:
Ad variation 2 of the ‘Risk-free’ VP (above, left) was the clear winner, claiming 50% of the leads generated in the whole campaign and 100% of leads generated in its ad group.
The ‘Risk-free’ ad group had almost double the click-through rate (CTR) compared to the ‘Exclusive selection’ VP ad group.
It was also noted that the best-performing ad variations from Test01 were the ones that had “no risk” somewhere on the on-image copy.
With these results in mind, we were then able to hone in on the ‘risk-free’ key message/VP for further testing, iterating on previous best performers to continually improve the cost-efficiency and volume of conversion.
You’ll see an example of this iterative copy on our Test03 creatives below.
Test03 - Further Retailer-targeted VP testing on Meta
Okay, so, at this point, from the results of Test00 and Test01 we knew that, for the Retailer user segment, the ‘Risk-free’ message was our best-performing VP. Especially when we used the words “no risk” on-image.
Now it was time to put it to the test against another key message/VP. Enter: Test03.
(In case you’re wondering, you haven’t lost count. Test02 was a separate conversion campaign targeting Brands rather than Retailers that I haven’t covered here because you haven’t got all day, right?)
The messages we tested against each other for Test03:
‘Risk-free’ - the winning VP from all tests so far.
‘Flexible payment terms’ - the new contender.
The results of this test changed the course for us because it showed that:
75% of leads generated came from our new VP - the ‘Flexible payment terms’ message.
The cost per lead of the ‘Flexible payment terms’ VP was also 67% cheaper than its counterpart.
Something had finally outperformed our ‘Risk-free’ champ.
A kind of social ad copy testing inception
So, what did all of this teach us? (And continue to teach us as our iterative testing continued thereafter).
Well, that just because something performs well doesn’t mean there isn’t another message or another phrase or another design format that won’t work better.
That’s the beauty of testing - the creatives you produce are grounded in facts and figures rather than guesswork.
It’s a science and an art.
If your business is working on testing a series of A/B paid media ads and you need some help writing with data-based, conversion-focused copywriting, get in touch.