Embr Labs Follows D2C Blueprint for a Successful Customer Acquisition Campaign

Embr Labs is a thermal wellness technology company with a cutting-edge wearable: the Embr Wave. This innovative device is worn around your wrist and helps you feel colder or warmer with the press of a button, providing comfort in any environment. Embr Wave launched on Kickstarter in the fall of 2017, and like many other D2C brands, used Google and Facebook to jumpstart its initial growth. But after achieving early success on these channels, rising costs and competition (a challenge that is becoming increasingly common) made it necessary to diversify its acquisition efforts to grow further.

Embr Labs needed a new acquisition channel that would allow their marketing team to:

1. Diversify its media spend.
2. Reach new audiences that would potentially resonate with its product.
3. Scale its acquisition efforts quickly with a focus on return on investment (ROI) and acquisition costs.

It was the need to diversify their media spend that first brought them to LiveIntent. Through the LiveIntent platform, Embr was able to access a truly differentiated acquisition channel that featured both premium placement in high-quality inventory and the ability to reach an incremental, fraud-free audience: Email.

But diversification was only one part of the puzzle. Embr also needed  the platform to deliver when it came to performance. Together with its account team, Embr Labs implemented a campaign that would meet their business goals and take full advantage of the unique email environment.

This customer acquisition campaign featured three key strategies:

1. Go as Wide as Possible: While it may seem like a niche product, Embr’s audience includes anyone with the capacity to sense changes in temperature. So it made sense to run the campaign across the entirety of LiveIntent’s open exchange. This strategy ensured that Embr Labs would reach as many new customers as possible while providing a large data set the platform to learn what would drive the best performance, making it possible to scale while still reaching its main business objectives: ROI and Cost Per Acquisition
2. Drive to a Relevant Landing Page: Being a single-product company, this one was easy. The campaign was able to simply drive users to Embr Lab’s homepage, where the company highlighted the functionality and benefits of the Embr Wave using a combination of simple, personable messaging and engaging creative. This helped to generate interest and understanding amongst its prospective customers, effectively driving them to make a purchase decision.
3. Suppress Existing Customers: One of the advantages of email is that it is an entirely logged-in environment, which makes it possible to match any email address within your CRM database to a person opening an email across LiveIntent’s exchange in real-time. While this feature can be used for targeting specific customer segments for retention or loyalty campaigns, Embr Labs used it to suppress existing customers from its acquisition campaign. This ensured its marketing budget was only being spent on net-new customers and prevented existing customers from receiving irrelevant messaging.

The end result for Embr Labs was a success! In the first six months of 2019, LiveIntent helped Embr drive almost 1,000 post-click conversions with a Return on Ad Spend of 183%. Simultaneously, they beat their CPA target, achieved better performance than on social, and saw success comparable to retargeting efforts on other platforms.

Want to learn more about how direct-to-consumer brands can overcome challenges as they grow? Check out our D2C webinar, where a panel of direct-to-consumer brands outline how they took their companies to the next level.