Nathan James is a globally distributed ecommerce brand that designs, engineers, and manufactures furniture that's high-quality, trendy, affordable, and easy to assemble. Nathan James has steadily grown into an industry force from selling a few barstools online during the 2017 holiday season to now carrying over 175 SKUs across many of North America’s prominent retailers including The Home Depot and Walmart. Today, the brand is heavily focused on curating the customer experience and growing their online store. Led by customer demand, it plans to expand into the light fixtures category with 60+ SKUs launching later this year.
Throughout 2021, 99.5% of Nathan James's sales came entirely through ecommerce retailers. The company focused on robust product selection and complemented it with digital advertising across the retailers’ channels. But in Q4 2021, Nathan James began investing in its very own DTC channel in hopes of improving brand engagement with its customers.
Internal data showed that social and search advertising attribution had low accuracy and reliability. To support their investments in paid media, Nathan James needed clarity around ad performance. It was looking for accurate measurement that could bring back the company’s confidence in allocating ad dollars to the most effective channels and marketing activities. Lack of attribution also impacted their ability to create relevant Facebook Lookalike Audiences. Nathan James tried expanding to a 10% Lookalike Audience to avoid higher advertising costs (CPMs). But while the strategy lowered CPMs it also increased targeting to low-intent buyers. Click-through rates (CTR) diminished, customer acquisition costs increased, and return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) sharply declined.
Frustrated with marketing inefficiencies, Nathan James immediately joined the Shopify Audiences beta program.
With Shopify Plus and Shopify Audiences, Nathan James saw results fast.
- +500 New customers attributed to Audiences
- +2.1x Improvement in Purchase Rate
- +176% Increase in Conversion Ratio
- +55% Increase in Marketing Efficiency Ratio
- 5.6x Return-on-ad-spend
- $100K+ In incremental revenue attributed to Audiences
- 52% Decrease in customer acquisition costs
Nathan James has also successfully created Facebook Lookalike Audiences (3%) using Shopify Audiences. At a time when pixel-based audiences have lost their benefit, Shopify Audiences offers a highly relevant seed audience to create lookalikes, and reach relevant customers at scale.
Shopify has enabled us to leverage insights from millions of direct connections that merchants have with their customers, so we can reach high-intent buyers. The reporting Shopify offers is a game-changer for DTC merchants. We are now able to invest in the right areas where there is measurable ROI.
