Tea Drops are bagless, whole-leaf tea pressed into fun shapes that dissolve into water. Named as one of the fastest-growing D2C brands of 2020, Tea Drops are a disruptive beverage product that make drinking a cuppa, convenient, fun and delicious.

[The Challenge] 

In April 2021 when Apple released their IOS-14 update, Tea Drops, who heavily relied on Facebook and Instagram advertising to fuel new acquisitions, saw their results falter. They wondered if Facebook and Instagram ads could ever work like they used to, or if they should channel hop and deploy their ad spend elsewhere. What were the missing? Was it just the IOS-update, or was something else going on? They turned to Fall Line Digital for help.

[The Solution] 

After a complete Facebook and Instagram advertising audit, we uncovered that Tea Drops could still use this channel to drive revenue while maintaining a profitable ROAS. Tea Drops needed a partner who was highly specialized with Facebook and Instagram ads to navigate this new era of advertising and get the results they deserved.

They could no longer rely heavily on the algorithm to do all of the work. But they could fine tune their retargeting strategy, ad content, audience personas and hero product ads to attract new lifetime customers.

Here are a few levers we pulled to turn things around:

• Conversions API

Tea Drops had not implemented Conversions API on their site – which is part of the reason why their ad results suffered – Facebook was not able to use their store data to find audiences with the highest propensity to purchase. We immediately implemented Conversions API and ordered conversion events in order of importance to comply with IOS-14 best practices and maintain the highest level of data possible.

• Revamping the Retargeting Strategy

When we took over the account, the basic retargeting ads running had a negative ROAS. We took a deep dive with the retargeting strategy by breaking down the ad levels by device, events and point of the funnel. We uncovered that IOS users yielded a negative return, and tested different offers, as well as creating specific retargeting messages for different products.

• Scaling Top Performing Ad Creative

Before we took over the account, there were nuggets of things that had been working, but because of the IOS updates, the account went into a frantic state where new ad creative was being launched almost every day. This didn’t give the algorithm a chance to work, and so we went back to the basics by relaunching and scaling evergreen ad creative that previously worked, while creating a test budget for new ideas.

• Creating New Top Performing Ad Creative

We uncovered that because Tea Drops isn’t like any other tea in the world, we needed video that showed this. It’s the little things that make Facebook ads work – like showing the product in the first 3 seconds of the video ad. We then coupled top performing ad creative with winning ad creative – and boom – the results poured in again.

• Creating New Customer Avatars

We went back to the basics to identify Tea Drops target audience. We uncovered that there were different audiences for different products, and campaigns should reflect that.

• Creating New Audiences

With our new customer avatars, we found certain interest audiences that had never been tested before – that became evergreen audiences. We also built out missing audiences such as 50% video viewers, Klaviyo email lists, social engagers, and Instagram Shopping audiences.

• ROAS Capping Conversion Campaigns

When testing new conversion campaigns we placed a ROAS cap to ensure our overall ROAS maintained above 150% – this helped us test new creative and audiences without losing money. Subsequently, we were able to take winning campaigns and turn them into traditional conversion campaigns and scale them without limiting the algorithm.

• Discovering Tea Drops ‘Hero’ Product

One of the biggest challenges that Tea Drops faced was that their average product costs $16, so when going after new acquisitions, even with a healthy CPA, it was challenging to get a high ROAS. We helped Tea Drops think about this differently and stopped sending traffic to lower priced product pages. Ultimately, we were able to identify our two products for new acquisitions, a boba deluxe kit and a deluxe sampler which both were above the free shipping threshold and helped improve the AOV and ultimately a high ROAS.

[Quoteable]

“WE LIKE WORKING WITH FALL LINE DIGITAL BECAUSE THEY ARE TRULY HANDS-ON. THE THOUGHTFULNESS AND CREATIVE IDEAS THEY PUT INTO THE ACCOUNT IS THE MOST OF THE MANY AGENCIES I HAVE EVER WORKED WITH.”- SASHEE CHANDRAN, TEA DROPS CEO & FOUNDER

[Engagment Overview] 

• Full Funnel Facebook and Instagram Advertising
• Brand Discovery
• Customer Avatar Creation
• Ad Content Creation
• Creative Consulting
• Competitive Research
• Copywriting
• Technical Ad Solutions
• Growth Strategy