How Casper Used Creative Testing To Get A Huge Increase In Clickthrough Rates

Tim: Welcome to ConversionCast, the only podcast that gets to the heart of the metrics. Now here’s another data driven case study.

What’s up fellow marketer? Thanks for being here today. Now before we dive into the really fantastic creative strategy, today’s guest used to get a mid double digit increase in his click through rate, I wanted to give you the details for this Thursday’s 3:00 p.m. Eastern Standard time webinar. In this awesome webinar, I’ll be sharing with you four simple steps to take to improve your opt-in rate without spending all of your time in marketing. To join me on this webinar, just text LeadPages all one word, LeadPages to 38470. Again text LeadPages to 38470. Again you’ll get registered for this Thursday’s free live webinar at 3:00 p.m. eastern time. Okay one more time, text LeadPages to 38470 and I’ll see you there.

Now today’s guest is Philip Krim, one of the founders of Casper, a fantastic company who focuses on creating products to improve the sleep experience. Their current product and awesome looking mattress has been their major focus in marketing. On today’s episode, Philip and I discussed how [0:01:17] [Indiscernible] used creative iterative testing to find out what ad design would get better results. They’ve been able to continue to refine this testing and I can’t wait for you to hear the results.

I’ve got to say it one more time, just to make sure it really sinks in, this Thursday 3:00 p.m., got a webinar. Text LeadPages to 38470 and let’s get into the episode. I’m’ Tim Page the conversion educator here at LeadPages, this is ConversionCast and here’s Philip Krim from Casper.

Hey Philip. Thanks so much for being here today.

Philip: Hey Tim, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Tim: Awesome. No problem. So you know, you guys are all over the place and Casper I keep seeing you know, your ads everywhere and really excited about what you’re doing. So this is going to be a lot of fun. Before we dive into kind of the tactic itself, I would love to hear what kind of results have you guys been getting from what we’re going to talk about today.

Philip: We’ve seen dramatic results from kind of iterative creative testing on our digital display and banner advertising. So we’ve seen mid double digit increase in click through rates and dramatic decreases to costumer acquisition based on an iterative focus to design testing of a lot of our digital creative assets.

Tim: That’s fantastic. I love it. And so I’d love to hear a little bit about kind of what Casper is all about and what your role is at the company? So could you share with us some details about that?

Philip: Absolutely. So my role I am the CEO and one of five cofounders of Casper.com. And Casper.com is a direct to consumer lifestyle brand focused on celebrating all things sleep related. And we’ve gone down that journey, started to go down that journey of building our brands by rethinking and reinventing the way that mattresses are designed, developed, and sold to consumers in the United States. So we launched a little over six months ago. We only sell our exclusively designed product through our website Casper.com and the product is something that we designed and developed and researched completely in-house. So one of my cofounders Jeff is our head of product and led the development process for the mattress and we’re very proud of it. We launched it, we consider it one of the most comfortable mattresses ever created and it’s really the first product in what will be many products that we sell direct to consumers through our website.

Tim: That’s fantastic and you know, we’ve seen kind of some of the results that you’ve been able to get and you guys are growing really quickly so that’s really awesome and congratulations on all that early success.

Philip: Thank you very much. We appreciate that.

Tim: Absolutely. So what we’re going to talk about today, you know, you’ve been going through this iterative process of you know improving your creative and seeing what gets results, and it’s really interesting because you know one thing that a lot of folks tend to focus on is just copy or you know, just elements of certain pages or whatever. But you know, one thing that you tested is what we’re going to talk about today and I find this really unique is that you tested particularly the imagery.

So can you tell us a little bit about kind of what it was that you are specifically testing?

Philip: Sure. So we like to run AB tests with different theses behind the two different tests and one of the core ones that we tested very early on was the difference between lifestyle imagery and the difference between product imagery. So we had one set of controlled creative that had our products images and we used a few different product images for that. And then our variable testing was around more of lifestyle imagery. So it used photos of people that were interacting with our products from photo shoots that we’ve done. And that was one of the very early tests that we wanted to focus on.

[0:05:01]

Because we think both are beautiful, grand, like exciting and great for promoting our story. But we saw that the lifestyle images were yielding a much higher as I mentioned earlier a double-digit increase in click-through rates over the more product-focused shots. And that was a really important early learning that we had from kind of our creative testing framework.

Tim: Yeah and both of these images we’re talking about featured the product but it’s just you know, the original kind of product focused images were just the product alone were just images of the product alone. Is that correct?

Philip: Exactly.

Tim: And then in the – the more lifestyle images you had may be folks lying on the bed or like I saw one with a dog lying on the bed , which was really fun.

Philip: [Laughs] yeah a number of different ways that people interact with it and it’s funny that when you do add the data layer to understanding what creative works and doesn’t work there are nuanced things that do make a very big difference to the overall performance of the campaigns. So we keep a very close eye on what’s working and not working because with a lot of display campaigns, a tenth of a percent or a few tenths of a percent difference on click through rate can make a dramatic difference to the profitability of the campaign.

Tim: Well yeah and especially at scale. I mean as you’re growing this and you’re putting more ad spend into it, these small kind of you know, percentage points can actually make a big difference. And so I guess where is the primary place that you’re doing your ad? Is it mostly Facebook ads or are there are more places that you’re focusing on your advertising.

Philip: Before Facebook we really started with retargeting, and that’s probably as you mentioned why you see us all over the place. We thought retargeting was really essential to how we bring people to the buy funnel and that was really where our first ad buys were in display and where we first started to do testing of different display creatives. Based on the success that we’re seeing there, we are now starting to extend our reach through social channels like Facebook, as well as more direct display buys through other content sites.

Tim: Interesting. And so the retargeting gave you a good initial level of success and that’s kind of why you’re branching out?

Philip: Exactly.

Tim: Awesome. Okay and so if you were –you know, I know that you’re kind of continuing to iterate on this, so now that you’ve found this kind of lifestyle imagery that works really well, what’s kind of the next thing that you’re testing in terms of you know, how do we take this to the next level? We’ve gone from product base to kind of just the you know, put something on the mattress or people interacting with the product. What’s the next step in that process room?

Philip: The test that we’re excited to run now are around kind of testing different variables around the call to action. So different color buttons and then different texts within the buttons that get people to click we think can be a very meaningful driver through ad performance. And so we’re starting to run now different copy within the call to action buttons and in different looks for the different color schemes that we run on the background of our call to action button. So we’re excited at some of the early learnings we have there and it’s something we’ll continue to test to drive marked improvement in overall creative performance.

Tim: Yeah that’s right. That’s something that we’ve seen a lot of success with is testing stuff like button copy , which you know, there are all these different things where you know, all of our customers have tried these things for example of putting the button copy in the language that the person clicking on it might you know, might use. So instead of saying I want to download your guide, they might be thinking I want to download my guide or you know, I want access now rather than putting it thinking you know, get to your access now that kind of thing. So I think that’s really interesting that that’s where you know, a lot of this focus is going but I guess my kind of final question here is if somebody did want to go out and kind of test the copy in the sense of may be they might not specifically have a product focus but they might be trying to do something where it a little bit more lifestyle focused, it is a little bit different than just displaying whatever it is that they want folks to –you know, they want to just show off whatever it is that they’re giving away or selling, what advice would you have for that person? What should they do to kind of you know, ensure that their testing yields positive results?

Philip: I would say is one always be testing. I think it’s pretty fundamental that you never know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work and what combination of things will work. The frustrating things with a lot of things digital one or even once you forgot what’s the working the best is oftentimes that changes as consumers change or as your brand or company evolves or changes. So it’s once you develop I think a fundamental framework where you’re always testing different creatives and different theories around what may or may not work.

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And two is really just to challenge kind of your traditional mindset and take different approaches to how you develop copy, how you develop imagery, how you develop colors that both are on brand but allow you to just put something different in front of consumers and see if it works better or not. Because it is kind of the constant improvement of creative performance that I think anyone who’s focused on digital marketing should strive for.

Tim: I love it. Well this has been awesome and I really appreciate you sharing with us. If anybody wants to – I actually see some of the creative used to kind of get a good example of the comparison that we had in this case study, you can go to ConversionCast.com/casperdownload. Again that’s  ConversionCast.com/casperdownload to see the creative use in this example. So again Philip thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate you coming on ConversionCast.

Philip: Thanks Tim. Really a pleasure. I appreciate it.

Tim: Thanks for listening to this episode of ConversionCast. If you liked what you heard here today, we have something awesome that we want to send you. Our amazing team has created a free reference guide for you with every single split test and piece of conversion data that we have access to here at ConversionCast. This free booklet is packed with incredible case studies and real metrics from real people to show you what’s really working across multiple industries right now. This is the kind of information you won’t find anywhere else. As one of our listeners, we want to give you a copy of this book absolutely free. You can get your copy right now by going to ConversionCastGift.com. Again, that’s ConversionCastGift.com. Go there now and pick up your copy and we’ll see you next time.