The Rockport Group is an American shoe manufacturer based in Newton, Massachusetts and is a leading designer and innovator of high-quality comfort footwear for both men and women. Their family of brands also include Cobb Hill, Dunham, and Reef.
Carbon provides strategic planning and management of ecommerce for the Rockport, Cobb Hill, and Dunham brands, which includes social, search, programmatic, and shopping. Over years of working together, Carbon has successfully built a full-funnel system across multiple channels to help drive millions of dollars of incremental revenue for Rockport’s brands. This omni-channel playbook is proprietary, but we can share one specific goal and strategy with you, dear case study reader and that is how Carbon procured new customers at the lowest cost possible and build out Rockport’s sales funnel more robustly across multiple channels. A big factor working against them was that the landscape of data privacy had started to change, and some older methods of audience targeting were no longer reliable.
The privacy changes meant that first-party customer data become increasingly important. As a result, Carbon pivoted some of the paid social effort to focus on lead generation on Facebook and Instagram. With these campaigns, customers are shown an ad with a link to an-in platform lead form. These forms collect contact information from potential customers (including email addresses) and can be used to build a 1st party database. Advertisers like Rockport can entice with a promo code to encourage customers to fill out the whole form. This data can then be used to generate lookalike lists, or to target the customer on the list directly through retargeting. These lists can also be uploaded and repurposed for other company initiatives such as email marketing stacks. We call this the “Ain’t No Party like a First Party Party Strategy.”
Carbon started lead gen efforts with the Rockport core brand and saw so much success that Cobb Hill and Dunham were added over time. Using advanced tactics, Carbon was able to reduce the CPL an average of 50% YoY (resulting in double the number of leads for the same price). To date, these campaigns have generated 40,000,000 impressions and over 400,000 emails, and for the last 90 days have had an average cost per lead of $0.81. In addition, through customer analysis, Carbon discovered that many of these leads went on to become reliable repeat customers - all for just the cost of the lead and promo offer.
Not deterred by Facebook ad platform changes, Carbon instead used them to Rockport’s advantage to build a lead generation engine that is consistently reliable in driving high-quality, low-cost 1st party useable leads.