How We Took Balterley To Their Best Month In Revenue

Launching Balterley’s range of quality products to a digital audience.

Balterley enjoys a strong retailer presence but saw an opportunity to grow by launching an online D2C store. After building their ecommerce store, they needed an experienced performance marketing agency to take them to market.

We took over Balterley’s performance channels in July 2024 with a simple strategy – get the fundamentals right. Fourteen months later, from a standing start, monthly revenue has risen by 134%.

Sounds easy, but ‘getting the fundamentals right’ is deceptively difficult. The ecommerce landscape is full of complex strategies that rarely outperform disciplined execution. Our approach focussed on three pillars across:

Acquisition, Conversion & Trust

These are the foundation of any effective marketing strategy, but success lies in how you apply them.

Acquisition

Finding the right audience with the right content. For Balterley this meant advertising on Meta – the largest social media network and necessary evil of e-commerce marketing.

With a core offering of kitchen and bathroom products, it was a no-brainer to advertise to people most likely to require home improvement, millennials and boomers. Meta’s targeting makes it easy for you to find your buyers – provided you feed it the right signals. To guide Meta, we first ran creative tests, testing features & benefits-led messaging vs products pulled from the Shopify catalogue. There was one clear winner – the catalogue. Sometimes clarity beats creativity. We then started to segment product sets, finding ‘winners’ as we went and weighting budget towards them. The result has been a 5.78 ROAS since launch, with October delivering a high of 7.9. Not bad.

Conversion

Behind every good acquisition channel, though, is an email marketing that turns interest into action and the opportunity to build loyalty through ‘owned data’. Using Klaviyo, we first implemented an offer in the form of a pop-up that incentivised users to sign up in exchange for a discount. Hardly groundbreaking, but this is about simplicity and implementing what we know works. Testing a percentage discount against a pound-off incentive, we found users responded far better to the pound-off offer. By tying the discount to a minimum spend, we protected AOV without giving away margin on larger orders.

Along with a welcome flow which converted users at a rate of 20%, we implemented cart and browse abandonment and post-purchase product education & thank-you flows, each playing their part in the customer journey and contributing to over 30% of revenue since we began.

Trust

Influencer partnerships added a layer of trust that ads alone cannot create. Throughout the year we specifically selected micro-influencers on Instagram who were currently mid-renovation and were able to create high-quality, aspirational user-generated content. These selected creators were gifted a Balterley sink and tap in exchange for content that showed the products in real kitchens. Each creator received a personalised 10 percent discount code which gave customers a simple entry point and gave us clean attribution. In October influencer codes accounted for 9.3% of total revenue, which helped push the month over the line and provided another cost-efficient conversion stream.

A System Built for Long-Term Growth

October’s result was not luck. It was the compounding effect of a system that has been built carefully and improved month by month. By getting the basics right from the beginning, we have built the foundations to scale and become more sophisticated as Balterley grows.