Case Study: How Folks Like Them Built A Predictable, Profitable Sales Funnel

Folks Like Them joined IndieX as an agency client in January 2021. They were a relatively new band having only formed 11 months prior. They had a large marketing budget behind them but had not yet launched a single product profitably despite having already released two albums and an EP. They wanted IndieX to completely rebuild their marketing ecosystem and to also plan and execute a profitable launch for their new album ‘Stages’ which they planned to release in August 2021. 

Before joining the agency, Folks Like Them had spent a lot of budget on cultivating 75% Video Views on Facebook using the Fan Finder method. They hadn’t done a huge amount to then capture those new fans as leads. The first thing we did as an agency was build out an opt-in campaign with an Introduction Series of emails to nurture those new fans joining their email list. 

When we were planning the launch of ‘Stages’ we knew that we needed to take a multi-pronged attack. 

The first thing that we did was launch a pre-sale bundle. The bundle itself contained a signed copy of the CD, a hand written thank you note, an artwork post card and two stickers and we made it clear that this bundle was a one-time offer and would never be repeated once the album was out. This offer was limited to their warm audience as a limited edition pre-order of the album. We used a combination of sales emails and also launched a conversion campaign on Facebook to generate sales. For the email side, we were able to segment their list and only target people that had completed their nurturing sequence. We also created a segment of people that had bought the bundle so they weren’t being hit with repeat sales emails for something that they had already purchased. For the Facebook campaign, we built out a master warm audience of their website visitors, video viewers, Facebook page engagement, Instagram page engagement, purchasers and email subscribers and targeted them for a conversions campaign that was optimising for purchases. The Ad campaign alone had a ROAS of 5.35. 

The second part of the launch was the experience element. We worked closely with the band to create a lot of exclusive content that would be delivered to opt-ins over several days whilst making sales offers to buy the ‘Stages’ CD that contained another 4 tracks that were not available in the experience. We ran opt-in campaigns for several months, making sure to send regular nurturing emails to build excitement for the album launch and to keep the list hot. We were able to secure 1,000s of leads from their warm audience and also from cold audiences. We added a low value tripwire offer to the thank-you page that essentially subsidised their opt-in campaigns before the experience even launched. 

The ‘Stages’ launch ended up being their first profitable album launch and is still running as an evergreen campaign to cold audiences to this day.  

The Results: 

• We generated millions of views and thousands of comments and likes.
• Thousands of new fans joined their email list. 
• Their Shopify revenue saw an uplift of 58%. 
• Online Store Sessions increased by 108%. 
• Their returning customer rate grew by 51%. 
• Total Orders went up by 49% 
• Sales attributed to email marketing increased by 383%. 
• We generated an overall return on ad spend of 2.34 on this launch.