Customer Acquisition: Facebook Ads Help Alex and Ani Increase Sales and AOV

Eco-friendly jewelry retailer Alex and Ani increased its sales and average order value (AOV) last year by ramping up its Facebook ad program.

In June 2013, Alex and Ani and the team at its e-commerce provider eBay Enterprise began using Facebook's Custom audiences targeting option to find offline prospects among Facebook users. Then it layered on Facebook's Lookalike audiences, which combined information on Alex and Ani's existing customers with Facebook data on users’ demographics, location and interests, to reach a new audience similar to the retailer's existing customers.

Alex and Ani also used Facebook's unpublished page post ads to create customized messaging for specific target audiences. These posts are used solely for advertising purposes and aren't published on the brand's official Facebook page. This allows Alex and Ani to maintain a streamlined voice on its page.

Alex and Ani also used Kenshoo Social's Demand-Driven Campaigns solution to create and manage product-specific advertising on Facebook based on its product feed. This ad creation enabled product-specific ads to launch quickly, while prioritizing top-performing products based on demand and performance signals, both improving performance and better optimizing spend.

Shortly after coming onto the Kenshoo platform in June 2013, Alex and Ani began to see positive performance from its Facebook ads. When comparing the performance of its Facebook ads for the six months before launching on Kenshoo Social to the six months after, Alex and Ani saw a revenue increase of 44 percent. Additionally, AOV rose from $14 to more than $75 — an increase of 434 percent.

"The Kenshoo Social platform, coupled with our team at eBay Enterprise, gave us the horsepower that allowed Alex and Ani to come out of the gate strong during the second half of 2013, and we plan to continue to scale our investment in Facebook advertising as a result of the performance we've seen," says Ryan Bonifacino, vice president of digital strategy at Alex and Ani.