Abstinence is a South-African brand of non-alcoholic spirits that came to life in 2019. Their Cape Spice and Cape Citrus spirits won gold in the Non-Alcoholic White Spirits category of the Spirits Business Low and No Masters in 2021 while their Cape Fynbos spirit won silver in the same category. Meanwhile, their Blood Orange Aperitif also scored gold in the same masters in the non-alcoholic aperitifs category.
Abstinence launched on Amazon UK in May 2021 and came to us in October 2021. They wanted to appoint an expert Amazon spirits distribution agency to make sure their marketing investment in the marketplace was effective and to improve their sales performance. But they also wanted to appoint a UK spirits distributor whose capabilities went beyond Amazon and help them land off-trade listings.
When we started working with Abstinence on Amazon in early 2022, the UK was under the grip of the cost of living crisis. The brand was investing heavily into Amazon PPC, which made sense as Abstinence was then a young and unknown brand needed to attract as many eyes as possible. But the ROI on this investment left something to be desired. And this impacted the profitability of Amazon as a distribution channel for Abstinence.
Task
Together with Abstinence, we identified 4 objectives for the next two years (2022 to 2024):
Action
Our first action was to audit Abstinence’s Amazon storefront and Amazon listings. Amazon works like a search engine: it ranks and presents results to the buyers based on how relevant the listings are compared to the search query. So keyword optimisation is key. This also has an impact on the Amazon ad performances. We discovered through our audit that Abstinence’s listings lacked in keyword optimisation. This partly explained the low ROI for their level of ad spend on Amazon PPC.
After addressing this issue, we turned our focus to weaning the Amazon algorithm off from the reliance on the large ad spend to the slowly to optimise their PPC budget even further in an efficient way. We put together a two-stage approach. In year one, our focus was going to be growing brand awareness at the top of the funnel with a smaller PPC budget. After 2022, we’ve followed a more targeted approach focusing on optimising for conversions on paid Amazon ads.
What we did in 2022:
What we did in 2023 and 2024:
Result
Even though consumer spending and confidence was in dire straits in the UK because of the cost of living crisis, we completely turned around the performance of Amazon as a sales channel for Abstinence in the space of 2 years. Our approach helped Abstinence:
Here’s what we delivered in numbers:
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