Building an e-commerce business over the course of 5 months by establishing consumer-centric brand standards and developing a sustainable growth strategy

Overview

• Designed a business-wide marketing strategy through a 5-month roadmap to scale up engagement metrics to over 50 new customers and over 300 followers on various social channels

• Developed all creative assets for targeted ad campaigns across social channels (Facebook and Instagram) and tracked A/B testing results to optimize conversions 

• Curated product roadmap strategy using JIRA to inform the development and timely launch of the company’s website and all other social channels

• Tracked and reported key metrics and performance indicators that measured overall business growth

• Delivered analytical insights through in-depth research from customer usage patterns and trends to help improve features and track product success metrics in a data-driven way using Google Analytics 

Project Ideation:

CherianTop came to life because I realized that there was a large gap in the market for unique earring sets. I love finding and collecting unique earring sets and I know that the current generation of young adults are all about standing apart from the crowd in any way possible. I saw that fashion was becoming more about individuality rather than going to the same ten retail stores with all the same fashion. Young adults are applauded and admired on social media sites, like Tiktok and Instagram, for having extremely unique aspects about them, whether that’s their personality, fashion sense, humor etc.

Below are pictures of typical jewelry found at nearly every retail store. Paying $12-15 for plain hoop earrings that I could find at nearly 5 other large retail stores absolutely did not excite me at all. I wanted to fill the gap in the market and that is how CherianTop was born.

Target Audience and User Persona

The target audience I had in mind for this project were young adults between the ages of 14-25. I chose this age bracket based on what I have seen on social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram. Individuality is key. I knew that young adults were craving for a more unique jewelry experience. Along with my own observations, I noticed the same interest within the same age range of 14-24 with my A/B tests on FB advertising and my conclusion was confirmed. After decades, jewelry has mainly not changed so why not throw some crab, jellyfish, cherry and donut earring sets into the mix? Why blend in when you were born to stand out?

I created a user persona for this project to get a better idea of who I was trying to target. I wanted to feel a connection to my customers so I created a user persona. (This user persona was a lot more thorough than those within my FitMisfit project and I found it to be beneficial to really put myself in my customer’s shoes and write down all details).

User Persona: a semi-fictional character based on your current or ideal customer.

Customer Journey Map

One part of creating a business entirely on your own that was overwhelming for me was mapping out how every piece connected. After some research, that is when I discovered customer journey maps. A customer journey map is a diagram that illustrates the steps your customers go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination. I kept this customer journey map to involved just the main retail website because at the time I had not incorporated the social media channels. This was a great diagram and tool for helping me sort out how all the pieces of my business connected.

CherianTop Website Layout

Instagram Social Media Page

One of the most intense parts of creating this business was choosing which distributors I wanted to purchase from and then also when I received the earrings I had to take photos of each set of earrings for around 20 pairs of earrings in multiple positions and locations for the initial launch of the website and the social media channels. Fortunately, I have always had an interest in and a knack for photography so I found simple props around the house to create high quality product photos for my website and social media channels.

Instagram Story Highlights

Highest Performing Advertisements using Facebook Advertising and A/B Testing

Facebook advertising is the most important piece of making sure my business was successful. There were many new terms and strategies to learn. After watching many YouTube videos and an online course I felt ready to tackle this large beast that would be the main point of gaining sales. My initial ads were very standard and frankly a little boring. Then I realized that I had created my user persona and had a target audience for a reason — to put myself in the customer’s shoes and make decisions based on the user. I pivoted my advertising strategy and completely turned around how I approached the advertisements and decided to cater the ads to a much younger audience through ‘meme’ based ads as well as a more colorful layout and I also improved the call to action (CTA). After making these changes my click through rate (CTR) dramatically improved! There was still room for improvement but I improved my click through rate by about 33%.

Through these changes I realized that it is important to optimize your ads and targets to continually increase your CTR and to have a user focused mindset to improve the product.

Facebook Advertisements

To properly track the performance of my Facebook campaigns, I used an analytics program, Google Analytics.

Campaign: A campaign contains one or more ad sets and ads. I chose one advertising objective for each of your campaigns.

Ad Set: Ad sets contain one or more ads. You’ll define your targeting, budget, schedule, bidding, and placement at the ad set level.

Ad: The creative you use makes up an ad.

Impressions: The number of times your ads were viewed.

CPM: The average cost per 1,000 impressions.

Reach: The number of people who saw your ads at least once. Keep in mind that reach is different from impressions, which may include multiple views of your ads by the same people.

Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your ad.

Relevance Score: A rating from 1 to 10 that estimates how well your target audience is responding to your ad.

Page Engagement: The total number of actions that people took on your Facebook Page and its posts, attributed to your ads.

Post Engagement: The total number of actions that people take involving your ads (or all posts, in some cases).

Link Clicks: The number of clicks on ad links to select destinations or experiences, on or off Facebook-owned properties.

Facebook Pixel: A piece of code for your website that enables you to measure, optimize, and build audiences for your ad campaigns.

Placement: Where ad units will appear. Options include Desktop and/or News Feed (Desktop and/or Mobile).

Google Analytics

Sessions: the number of times a user opened a browser to a page on your site.

Users: the number of unique users that opened those pages on your site.

Pageviews: the number of pages viewed by a user during a session. This will likely be higher than sessions.

Pages/Session: the number of pages divided by the number of sessions.

Average Session Duration: the average amount of time of each session. Users can have multiple sessions.

Bounce Rate: the percentage of single-page sessions that left without interacting with your page.

Conclusion

Despite the HUGE learning curve, I learned so much from this business from marketing and sales to Facebook advertising. I realized Facebook advertising can be a great marketing channel for the right business. The most important points to remember are target specific interests, use eye catching images, give users a low-friction conversion, and track everything.

After a week or two of learning what worked for my business, I was able to generate a steady source of conversions from the world’s largest social network.

In the end, I decided to not continue this project after a few months because I gathered that I have a lot to learn about entrepreneurship before I fully venture off into creating my own business. However, the amount I learned from this business was tremendous and priceless. I know that I will definitely create a magnificent product one day — this was just a taste of my future.