Dairy Alternative Company Growing DTC Channels

Elmhurst 1925 is a dairy alternative company that makes a range of products including alternatives to traditional milk and coffee creamers in variety of flavors. 

When Elmhurst 1925 initially hired attention labs to work with their marketing team they had not found much success with online paid advertising.  Elmhurst 1925 was being sold in a limited number of physical retailers.  Their main goals were to:

1. Expand into more mainstream retailers
2. Use social media marketing to drive sales online

Essentially, the Elmhurst marketing team was confident that there was a way to earn a large portion of their revenue from direct to consumer (DTC) sales online. 

Their target numbers for online acquisition were:

• >=2 ROAS
• <= $30 CPA

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Elmhurst 1925 is a dairy alternative company that makes a range of products including alternatives to traditional milk and coffee creamers in variety of flavors. 

When Elmhurst 1925 initially hired ATTN Labs to work with their marketing team they had not found much success with online paid advertising.  Elmhurst 1925 was being sold in a limited number of physical retailers.  Their main goals were to:

1. Expand into more mainstream retailers
2. Use social media marketing to drive sales online

Essentially, the Elmhurst marketing team was confident that there was a way to earn a large portion of their revenue from direct to consumer (DTC) sales online. 

Their target numbers for online acquisition were:

• >=2 ROAS
• <= $30 CPA

Not only would these targets allow them to continue scaling their online advertising spend but they would increase the companies profitability allowing them to spend more on creative development and email marketing. 

Our initial approach was to work closely with the creative team to develop new types of creative assets (advertisements) to test.  The team had started out using low production quality product shots set to fairly bland backgrounds.  There was little testing going on with their creatives. 

The number one way to find success with new product offerings or creatives is to test rapidly and track results.

In addition to the new product shots and lifestyle images for the products (people using the product in the kitchen, shots of people opening the product etc…) we had the team start working on an unboxing video. 

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This video took longer then their other creatives to produce due to the need for a storyboard and or script for the video.  Despite the extended production time, the video was a massive success.  It was one of the first creatives to show mass market appeal and allowed us to immediately scale our paid advertising to some of the cold traffic audiences we were testing. 

The Leverage Point Most Businesses Miss

This is a point you will see repeated in many of our case studies.  Almost every company’s sales will show you that about 80% of all revenue is coming from just a few products (often just 1). 

If you have already found a clear winner, this is when you need to double down on what’s working with the mining approach.  You need to optimize and scale your campaigns for your top product on the marketing channel you are on before you worry about other products or channels. 

In Elmhurst’s case, there were two products that were head and shoulders above the rest.

1. Oat Milk Creamers
2. Unsweetened Almond Milk

These two products were selling at a high volume to a variety of cold traffic audiences.  Instead of trying to push multiple products to cold traffic, we were able to leverage the success of these two products to get new customers into Elmhurst’s remarketing funnels. 

The customers we acquired using the two above mentioned products as cold traffic offers were then remarketed a variety of other products and offers (including subscription offers) via email marketing campaigns, messenger campaigns and remarketing ads. 

During the first 6 months of scaling their offers we drove an increase in ROAS by over 200% on their remarketing ads while INCREASING spend by over 1000% on cold traffic.

Cold Traffic and Remarketing Always Have to Scale Together

Mainstream Retail Push

A secondary objective for Elmhurst was to move into some of the high value retail chains associated with wellness and healthy living.  For Elmhurst1925, this meant Sprouts and Whole Foods.  

In order to make their initial month in these retail chains as successful as possible, Elmhurst1925’s marketing team developed a plan to target a select grouping of locations on the East and West coast of the continental US. 

With the help of their marketing team we developed a plan to launch geo-targeted campaigns within a specific radius of the high foot traffic retailers and metro areas that were selected for this preliminary launch. 

Due in part to the success of this preliminary launch effort, and the meticulous planning and negotiations for placement within stores by the Elmhurst team, their plan allowed them to extend their placement in these two retailers indefinitely.  

The Elmhurst1925 team is now working on a second set of retailers to expand into for their next phase of growth.