Energizing Goal Zero’s DTC Strategy: How We Helped Drive a 70% YoY Increase in Q1 Gross Revenue
Project overview:
An industry leader in portable and eco-friendly energy and one of Utah’s Top 50 Fastest Growing Companies, Goal Zero is at the forefront of the sustainable power market.
In 2022, when the brand sought to go direct-to-consumer for the first time, they turned to Lunar for support.
Presented with ambitious Q1 goals, Lunar successfully implemented a technology-enabled, multi-channel approach to hit Q1 revenue goals while maintaining a profitable contribution margin.
Our team built a holistic strategy across paid social, SEM, landing pages, creative, and email, leveraging some key enabling technologies along the way:
KnoCommerce and Northbeam worked in tandem to help validate strategies, budget, tactics, campaigns, and creative. Both tools were especially crucial in deploying a successful prospecting strategy to help fill the funnel with high-intent prospects.
70% Increased Q1 Gross Revenue YoY
75% Increased Q1 Orders YoY
137% Increased MER YoY
Leveraging data in conjunction with agile creative testing increased purchase volume, AOV, and revenue all while reducing spend.
Overcoming the challenge of marketing during a milder winter that negated our ability to anchor messaging around extreme weather preparedness and storm readiness.
Extreme weather conditions are often a catalyst for Goal Zero purchase decisions, however, the comparatively mild weather across the US posed a significant challenge during Q1.
This challenge necessitated creative innovation, and we shifted our focus from weather preparedness to a series of targeted seasonal messages, most prominently an “everyday outdoor adventure” theme that married footage of winter activities with pertinent winter adventure messaging.
This shift in creative strategy allowed us to test different messaging, from value propositions to product-feature callouts, and granted invaluable insights applicable to both evergreen and sale creatives throughout the quarter.
Utilizing post-purchase survey data to shorten the customer journey after determining that 1/3 of users spent more than a year in the awareness stage.
One of Goal Zero’s biggest challenges was shortening the customer journey; as of Q1 2023, our Post-Purchase survey data showed that over ⅓ of users reported spending more than a year in the awareness stage prior to their first purchase.
Based on the data, we determined the best strategy was to increase the amount of social proof assets, including customer and press reviews, in our advertising efforts. This built trust with potential customers in the “consideration” phase and thereby expedited the conversion timeline.
Further, we shifted channel budget allocation towards platforms that were most cost effective per user who reported that that platform was their first interaction with the Goal Zero brand.
We also shifted middle-and-bottom-of-funnel budgets towards highly successful display and search channels that were reported as the “reason for visit” in survey data.
These strategic budget reallocations were based on customer feedback rather than platform-reported numbers, revealing critical insights that would otherwise have been overlooked.
Driving revenue for an always-on promotion without impacting evergreen sales and simultaneously boosting AOV for the discounted products.
Goal Zero presented us with an always-on promotion for “Open Box” products – refurbished versions of hero SKU’s sold at discounted prices.
To achieve the concurrent goals of driving sale purchases while boosting AOV and not impacting evergreen performance, we leveraged creative assets featuring the highest-priced Open Box items against an audience of high-value site traffic. We funneled the traffic to the Open Box products’ corresponding evergreen SKU product pages.
We accomplished this by launching a “website window shopper” retargeting audience that included consumers who had spent the most time on the PDPs for Goal Zero’s two most powerful and expensive power generators without making a purchase.
Over the course of Q1, our website window shopper audience became our strongest retargeting audience for both sales and evergreen efforts. These learnings guided our strategy for short-term sales throughout the rest of the quarter; for a Spring Cleaning sale, we leveraged a similar retargeting audience and drove a 117% higher AOV than our evergreen retargeting campaign.
We boosted overall AOV and further collaborated with our email team to increase LTV of existing customers.
Given their 6-12 month conversion window, Goal Zero had previously struggled to fill retargeting funnels with high value leads. They looked to Lunar to combat this challenge.
Our SEM team collaborated with our email team to expand efforts around promotions, campaigns, and email flows – this helped us achieve revenue goals while increasing customer LTV and % of revenue driven from email marketing.
This allowed us to reallocate budgets from retargeting tactics into prospecting efforts – Leaning more on email to nurture users already in the funnel and focusing paid search efforts on acquiring new customers and filling up retargeting funnels.
Further, we increased efficiency by leveraging demographic and audience exclusions to limit our targeting audiences to our true core customer persona.
With increased Q1 gross revenue targets, our team was challenged to maintain a 6x ROAS without the aid of new product launches or promotions.
To hit Goal Zero’s revenue and ROAS goals, we prioritized high AOV products by shifting our efforts towards high-value home backup products during the winter months. These efforts, coupled with leveraging our Open Box promotions in lower funnel campaigns, contributed to a 69% higher ROAS on 52% less spend while driving consistent purchase volume YoY.
Lunar Increased Klaviyo revenue and efficiency by improving the overall customer journey via revamped email flows.
Goal Zero came to Lunar with email flows that were underperforming and accounting for just 16.7% of Klaviyo revenue.
During our audit, we identified several issues with Goal Zero’s existing email flows: insufficient emails, outdated designs, branding misalignment and missing flows crucial to boosting conversion rates. Furthermore, the content wasn’t meeting customers where they were in their shopping journey.
To improve the flows, we completely redesigned the customer journey, mapping the ideal path from initial site visit to repeat purchase. This enabled us to pinpoint the most pivotal moments of each customer journey and create flows and content tailored to each step.
In parallel, we worked to incorporate education and social proof within our emails, sharing product details higher in the funnel and social proof through press and customer reviews in the middle of the funnel. We also tailored content based on customers’ browsing and purchase behavior, which significantly boosted conversion rates across our flows.
Despite our updated Cart Abandonment flow reaching only ⅓ of the users as the previous flow (due to list cleanup and more structured segmentation), we were able to drive 303% more attributed revenue.
91% Increase in Klaviyo Revenue Driven by Flows QoQ
122% Increase in Conversion Rates QoQ
44% Decrease in Unsubscribe Rates QoQ
In addition to achieving consistent DTC growth, Goal Zero has earned praise as a top tier manufacturer of power stations and outdoor lighting by publications like Forbes, NYT Wirecutter, Rolling Stone, Men’s Health, Popular Science, and WIRED amongst others.
