Why Glamnetic Turned to Disco Audiences to Acquire New User Segments
Glamnetic is the beauty brand behind the industry’s premier magnetic lashes and liners, which have been lauded by celebrities and influencers like Doja Cat, Iggy Azalea, and Christina Milian.
Within a year, the company scaled from a bootstrapped operation in its founder’s apartment to a global eCommerce name driving $50 million in revenue.
We sat down with Margaret Fortner, Head of Growth at Glamnetic, to discuss topics like:
- Unprecedented challenges faced by marketers in the post-iOS 14 era
- How Disco Audiences fares compared to other custom audiences
- Leveraging Disco to intelligently reach and acquire customers
Finding Your Audience in a New Landscape
Having launched in June 2019, 2020 was a great year for Glamnetic, as it was for many brands.
After all, Facebook’s “golden era” of targeting ran from 2016 to 2021. But once iOS and privacy updates rolled out, the standard suite of paid targeting platforms was effectively stunted.
Glamnetic saw immense growth through paid social to start, but these changes quickly forced Margaret to pivot, test, and diversify their marketing channel mix.
Losing Classic Paid Strategies
Since then, she’s seen the efficacy and capital efficiency of running Facebook campaigns — from broad targeting to lookalikes to interest groups — shift.
Today, we see a notable cap on Facebook’s capabilities. After the iOS rollout, Margaret immediately noted a drop in click-through rates despite using the exact same creative.
As such, she’s been testing varied Facebook strategies, trying out TikTok, diversifying creative, and even running TV ads — all in efforts to efficiently re-engage and acquire customers.
The Disco Promise
Prior to Disco Audiences, Margaret relied on lookalikes from CRM lists, interest audiences via Facebook, and other custom audience tooling to drive net new user acquisition.
Now more than ever, she emphasizes the obvious value of having strong first-party data.
Most of her partners set themselves up as second-party data vendors that provide more accurate and expansive data than the third-party results of Facebook, TikTok, etc.
With Disco, Margaret is by and large more confident in the data Glamnetic gets.
The team knows precisely what brands are in-network, and she can essentially dive into the data pool to decipher and define what info is most relevant and helpful.
“Facebook could display the best ad in the world, but it might be to an irrelevant audience that won’t click on it. With Disco, we actually get that audience back.”
How Disco Compares to Competing Platforms
Overall, Margaret highlights her positive experiences with the Disco platform as compared to other custom audience tools in the eCommerce infrastructure ecosystem.
In particular, she names the benefit of not getting locked into a 12-month contract since, as a two-year-old business, Glamnetic cannot commit to year-long contracts outside its core stack.
As such, having the flexibility to test and invest in stages without pressure to commit is vital.
Even more, younger companies like Glamnetic understandably don’t want to pay for tools that do not perform well. In the case of Disco:
- If it’s working, Margaret can double down and scale the audience partnership
- If not, she can turn it off, make adjustments, and adapt a timeline to suit Glamnetic
“What gives Disco Audiences a competitive edge is the quality data set that powers it. I know which brands are on the Disco Network – leading DTC brands I know my customers are probably shopping with – so I have the confidence to leverage this incremental source of data.”
Best Practices for Disco Audiences
Meanwhile, compared to Glamnetic’s testing of other audience products, Margaret has been impressed by Disco Audiences’ far stronger performance.
In running Audiences campaigns so far, she’s established a few best practices:
- Leveraging UGC-type ads and montage videos for rapid testing
- Taking advantage of lowest-cost audiences or lowest-cost bidding
- Testing the top-performing creative with the highest ROAS over the last 14 days
“It's all a math equation. If a CPM goes up, the click-through rate and conversion rate have to improve by the same amount or better. Disco can deliver on that.”
The Key Benefits of Disco Audiences
Margaret points to a handful of key benefits of implementing Disco Audiences such as:
- Central KPI improvements, namely CPAs and ROAS
- Almost zero cost compared to what she pays for other tooling
- The leading DTC brands within the Disco network (with promise of valuable audience overlap)
On the metric front, promising results from Facebook activity indicates to the Glamnetic team whether it’s time to scale use of and investment in a platform like Audiences.
Having tested roughly ten variations of Disco Audiences on the social platform, Margaret has witnessed CPMs improve sizably — especially compared to lookalikes.
Audiences is also performing at or below the brand’s target CPA.
“Across metrics like percent lift in ROAS or AOV and percent decrease in CPO or CPA — using Disco Audiences has led to improvements of 10 to 20%.”
Looking Forward: A Long-Term Audiences Partnership
Margaret affirms her excitement to continue working with the Disco team, the Disco Audiences platform, and their broader network of mutually supportive DTC eCom brands.
More specifically, she points out three specific use cases she’s looking forward to:
- Continuing to strategically leverage high-quality, high-impact data
- Unique opportunities for both direct and indirect cross-brand partnerships
- The Disco team’s availability, expertise, and willingness to work with brand clients
As a final note, Margaret underscores the positive returns on Glamnetic’s Audiences experience.
“Acquisition is the lifeblood of any brand. As Head of Growth, it’s my job to discover and test cost efficient ways to engage and acquire new customers. Disco Audiences can really help close the gap as we try to recover the targeting capabilities that we, as marketers, lost with the iOS updates.”
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