Executive Summary
L&L Candle is currently a multimillion flameless candle brand that began selling on Amazon in 2021, and has had a strong off-Amazon retail presence for many years.
In 2022, L&L Candle came to Azama Brands to expand on their prior efforts with a full service agency to make Amazon one of their leading distribution channels. In June 2022, Azama Brands began an intensive overhaul of L&L Candle’s overarching brand strategy, creative content, and conversion optimization. Azama Brands approached their preferred Amazon Advertising Optimization partner, Mayan, to begin managing the daily advertising strategy and management in July of 2022, increasing sales while maximizing profitability. With Azama Brands and Mayan partnering together, L&L Candle grew total sales by 266% in 12 months.
Challenges
L&L Candle already had a thriving brand and distributed their multiple brands of high quality flameless candles in retail stores, online, and even with QVC. They were interested in taking advantage of the opportunities that Amazon offered sellers and believed it had the potential to be one of their largest grossing revenue channels.
When L&L Candle began working with Azama Brands, their Amazon account had experienced success, but growth had stalled. To achieve their goals, they decided to work with specialty service providers in the Amazon space, rather than continue with their full service agency provider. Azama Brands worked to update the overall Amazon store brand strategy and its creative assets – store design, product photography, product listings, and implementation of Premium A+.
They also began various experiments to better understand audience behavior. Once Azama felt that they had a firm understanding of the audience and were ready to roll out more products through Amazon, they decided to work with a technology company to automate the process in growing the brand.
How Mayan Helped
Mayan Account Manager, Chris Sawicki, an Amazon PPC expert and current 6-figure Amazon seller, used Mayan's proprietary machine-learning ads-optimization software to develop advertising campaigns aligned with L&L Candle’s business goals – to maximize high value traffic that converts profitably. This required continuous iterations to adjust and manage the advertising strategy accordingly.
Together, L&L Candle, Azama, and Mayan reviewed business performance by utilizing Mayan’s Monthly Reports and Dashboards.
Mayan also created multiple advertising campaigns to help L&L Candle launch hundreds of new products quickly and efficiently. Utilizing Mayan’s Keyword Generator Tool, L&L Candle was able to increase targeting as the number of products sold more than tripled from 242 ASINs before Mayan to 777 ASINs with Mayan. In addition, L&L’s estimated gross profits on Amazon also tripled from the year before Mayan to the year after leveraging Mayan’s technology and expertise.
While such revenue and profit growth is great, efficient growth is even better. Mayan’s bid adjustments and overall automations allowed the account to maintain its goal of a 4+ ROAS while increasing ad spend and sales in parallel. For context, even with the total advertising costs increasing by $1M during the year before Mayan vs. the year with Mayan, the ROAS was still able to increase as well, which is typically a difficult achievement at such scale.
As a testament to continued opportunities to grow the account more efficiently, the ROAS has improved by 16% in the first two months of Year 2 of L&L Candle and Mayan. Lastly, their TACoS went from 33% at the high end, due to launching so many new products, to as low as 14% on the low end. Given the 100s of new ASINs being launched, that type of efficiency means L&L Candle can reinvest further in further growth.
How Azama Helped
Strategist Rachel Johnson Greer, a former Amazonian who worked on private brands at Amazon, used Brand Analytics and Advertising reports to determine the high performing keywords and targeting approaches that were working. Then, pages were updated with the new Premium A+ widgets that had recently been launched on Seller Central.
Rachel worked closely with the brand’s Marketing Director, Becky Monraz, to use data from the brand’s DTC website and mirror the search and shopping behaviors of customers on their website to the Amazon Storefront. Google Analytics provides exceptionally detailed traffic and customer journey data, which can be used on Amazon to maximize customer value.
In addition to developing new Premium A+, fully building out a new Storefront, and overhauling the design of image carousels and adding additional SEO content to all listings, Azama Brands created Spanish language Premium A+ and written content to increase discoverability, implemented a brand specific discount and promotional strategy, and created unique virtual bundles to increase cross-selling opportunities.
In the 12 months from June 2022 to June 2023, Azama Brands maintained conversion on top products, while increasing conversion on some items by 1-3%, even while Mayan increased traffic from a million page views to over three million page views. In the year after Azama Brands took over the Storefront, revenue increased by 4.78x. And, repeat customer order rates went from 25.7% to 29.2% through email campaigns, Amazon Live campaigns, and brand tailored promotions.
Next Steps
The collaboration between L&L Candle, Azama, and Mayan will yield further growth as L&L looks to develop and sell even more products; Azama Brands continues to provide the expertise and implementing best practices in content marketing and conversion rate optimization; and Mayan keeps iterating through its technology product with ever-increasing products and features. The next challenges for the team are to continue growing efficiently and ensuring that all products, new and old, keep up with consumer demand.
