Darren Williams is the chief marketing officer at wigs.com, an e-commerce website that sells hair and beauty products. When Darren noticed the business was making a loss, he reached out to AdRoll for help with retargeting and improving how ads performed.
Since then, the business has enjoyed year-on-year growth. We sat down with Darren to hear his #DareToGrow story and find out why he pulled in the experts to turn the company’s fortunes around.
Founded in 2000, Wigs.com is a website that sells beauty products and wigs to women across the US. Around three million people visit the website each year, and its sole purpose is to help empower women: most of our customers are buying wigs for medical reasons, such as chemotherapy treatment, or for alopecia. Losing hair can knock your confidence, so we try to help them feel great again with our wigs and hair pieces.
My personal experience inspired me to be in this industry. When I was 16, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, which was a very difficult period. She once went to buy a wig in a local store, and it was a terrible experience for her; she felt her choices were limited. This made me realize the importance of putting more emphasis on the actual marketing message and how we present our products so they’re more relatable to the customer.
When I joined wigs.com, the first thing I did was to look at the numbers. I remember sitting in my office, coffee in hand, looking at three big screens like it was a NASA Space Station. I soon realized that we were making a substantial, five-figure loss per month. It was one of those moments where you think: “We’ve got to change it. We’ve got to stop and make sure the company doesn’t suffer.”
The biggest challenge for us identifying the problem. We realized some of our channels weren’t working. For example, organic was doing amazingly, but paid channels, like AdWords, weren’t doing so well. We then decided to bring in experts, like AdRoll, and use a different ad agency to improve our marketing.
AdRoll did an amazing job working with the agency closely to identify our various customer groups. The team at AdRoll were also on hand to help monitor, manage and optimize our display retargeting channel.
If you don’t connect with the right people, you may as well throw money down the drain. What I love about AdRoll is that they’ve helped identify high-intent customers and those who are lower down the buying funnel. By understanding where they hang out, we’re able to target our marketing messages to incentivize these people to visit our website and buy. As a result, we’ve seen an uplift in sales of up to 50%.
Inspired by my mother’s initial experience of buying wigs, we launched the "Wigs Lounge" in England, a pampering experience for customers where they can sit down with a coffee and get one-to-one advice and specialist help. It was rewarding helping people like my mother, and we’ve now tried to replicate some of the lounge experience online – through displaying ads or content in a certain way. We’re also highlighting the key things that customers should know when buying a wig, so we can make a real difference in people’s lives.
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Last updated on August 16th, 2022.