Challenge
Crew Clothing has bold expansion plans. CEO David Butler wants the brand “to become the most successful mid-market player in UK fashion”. With an engaged and loyal consumer base, the brand felt it had significant headroom to grow, particularly in the UK. To take their growth to the next level, Crew wanted to partner with a paid social agency that could navigate choppy waters and lead on strategy. In a rapidly changing paid social landscape, it was important this partnership was with a specialist that could keep the retailer on course.
Customer acquisition was essential if the brand wanted to achieve this growth – and paid social creative is the best way to get in front of customers in an engaging way. That’s why it was essential that the brand had the right creative strategy in place. Our creative experts at Nest Studio found that Crew’s previous creative wasn’t always optimised for paid social and highlighted areas to drive performance.
Meanwhile, Crew previously had been allocating a significant proportion of spend on targeting at the bottom of the funnel focusing on retention and retargeting. This meant that they weren’t making the best use of paid social for prospecting and were losing out on customer acquisition essential for their growth plans.
Solution
We carried out our creative strategy in close collaboration with the team at Crew. This included a series of bespoke creative workshops and working with the brand’s in-house team on how to create thumb-stopping paid social ads. Next, when a busy period of sales led to higher demand for creative, Nest Studio worked as an extension of the team to produce ads for Crew that drove immediate results and enabled testing, with a 20% higher ROAS and 81% higher CVR.
Crew’s eyes were set on expansion – and that meant investing in customer acquisition. To support this strategy, we shifted budget allocation to find the brand’s next best customers. The result: prospecting CTR increased by 54%.
Despite challenges with data visibility since iOS 14, there are now clearer strategies for success. To prove our strategy worked, we melded data from multiple sources including Meta’s in-app data and Crew’s backend and analytics platforms and created proxies to compare performance like-for-like pre and post-iOS 14. When all these sources showed results, with an 18% increase in purchases in the few months since we took over the account, the brand could be confident in increasing spend.
Finally, we created a strategic testing roadmap to establish which areas offered the greatest opportunity. A quick win was to test dynamic ads for broad audiences, which are ideal for supporting prospecting activations.
What were the results of Crew’s bold new paid social and creative strategies? The brand felt confident increasing YoY spend by 70% – with a 60% increase in channel investment from their initial planned spend after our strategy showed early results. This led to 3x more purchases from new customers. In the current environment, it pays to be bold.
70%
increased spend YoY
3x
more purchases from new customers
20%
higher ROAS for Nest Studio creative
54%
increased CTR for prospecting
Our relationship with Nest is really collaborative. And that is exactly what we were looking to get from our relationship with a specialist agency
Ally Bradshaw
Digital and Customer Director at Crew Clothing
