A&M Cupcakes Sold Products Worth LKR 287,500 During their Christmas 2021 via Facebook Ads

Had a great experience working with Ammar and the team of Marcabees. They helped us immensely in our marketing plans during seasonal offers and they provided a one stop shop experience including designs, copywriting and ads placement. Highly recommended for all kinds of digital marketing solutions.

– Mufaddal Saldiwala, Owner, A&M Cupcakes

Overview:

A&M Cupcakes is a premium bakery from Colombo, Sri Lanka. Founded in 2010, A&M Cupcakes are the perfect delicious retreat for Sri Lankans across the island. Started by a couple, A&M Cupcakes gives you a family vibe every time you enter their stores in the busy area of Havlock Town and Kolpetty in Colombo.

This family ran business for over 13 years has served millions of customers across Sri Lanka and are looking to expand their operations internationally. “Taste is the king and without quality materials you cannot sustain a long-term business model” reckons one the of founders of A&M Cupcakes.

Challenges:

In 2010, A&M Cupcakes launched their first store in Kolpetty, Colombo and received great response from new customers. Their unique menu combined with the sweet tooth nature of Sri Lankan audience gave them so much success over the years that they decided to launch another store in Colombo. This new Havlock Town store was expensive to set up but their customers flocked the place and they could reach the break-even point earlier than anticipated.

Everything was running smoothly for over 10 years with both the business and the customers in a happy state of affairs. But suddenly COVID-19 hit Sri Lanka and things were not the same anymore.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions, A&M Cupcakes suffered huge losses in terms of inventory, customers, profits, even revenue. To add to the misery, the government restrictions put a pause on all their current operations due to the infectious rate COVID-19 was spreading across the country and the world.

Solution:

This is when we reached out to A&M Cupcakes and offered to take their entire operations online via an e-commerce website.

The e-commerce website could enable them to continue their operations the way they conducted in the past with technological advancements. Their entire inventory would now go online with customers having the option to select and pay directly on the website.

Reluctant at first, they agreed to test the waters during the first lockdown in Sri Lanka just to ensure the business continued its operations and they didn’t lose customers.

Objective:

To create an infrastructure online which ensured the menu was available virtually and customers could purchase merchandise online.

Once this first step was achieved, we were tasked to run marketing campaigns – paid and organic to drive traffic on the website like they did earlier by encouraging footfall to their 2 stores in Colombo.

Strategy:

One of the major requirements of the customer was an easy and a user-friendly backend that they could also manage to list products and their other details.

Hence, we decided to build their e-commerce website on WordPress. WordPress gives you all the tools you need to publish content and sell products from the same platform. We can create a powerful and stable online store and install more plugins to help you customize products, attract customers, and increase your sales. Payment gateway integration is also seamless.

After the website creation, we needed to establish our presence on social media platforms. For a bakery to not have a social media presence is criminal, they were missing out on a huge medium to reach their target audience.

So we signed them up on Facebook and Instagram to kick-start things. Once they gained enough followers, we decided to run advertising campaigns on Facebook Ads to sell their delicacies and increase their market share in the Sri Lankan bakery industry.

Results:

The e-commerce website that we created: https://anmcupcakes.com is a stable platform for both the business and the customers to interact with each other. The process of viewing the merchandise in details, paying online, getting proper communication and goods being delivered in a timely fashion is working seamlessly keeping all the stakeholders happy.

The next step was to grow their social media presence to create brand awareness and display their desserts online to entice potential customers to buy online. Now they have over 5,700 genuine followers on Instagram and close to 4,000 genuine followers on Facebook. And you can check the quality of the posts and the engagement level they receive on both the platforms. Instagram even has a Shop set-up which enables the bakery to upload their desserts on Instagram which can then be purchased on the e-commerce website.

After tasting the initial success, with the e-commerce platform and the social media organic growth, we decided to ramp up growth by running advertisements online.

We had initially created a timeline where we would lay the foundation on which we could build our digital sales similar to the two stores A&M Cupcakes already had in Colombo, Sri Lanka. And the timing also couldn’t have been better as we were 6 weeks away from Christmas, which was the bakery’s biggest season of the year.

Christmas 2021:

So we ramped up our efforts and started working on creatives (images and videos), copywriting for the campaigns and A/B testing with different audiences. We had shortlisted 4 categories that we wanted to run ad campaigns for: Cakes, Gift Hampers, Christmas Specials and NYC (New Year’s Celebration) Bundles.

It took us 2 weeks to complete and finalize on 21 images and 4 videos we were going to use as creatives; 8 short form copies and 8 long form copies; 20 headlines; 4 landing pages and 20 call-to-actions (CTAs).

The structure was ready and we started advertising on the 1^st of December 2021. The start was a bit rocky as customers took a little while to trust the entire process, but with our regular optimization techniques sales started picking up, and once they picked up, we never looked back.

At the end of the month, we managed to get:

• 47 orders (sales/purchases on the website)
• Reached 119,949 people
• Showing them the ads 659,934 times (impressions)
• We sold products worth LKR 2,87,500 with a ROAS of 185%

This also accounted for 42% of overall sales collected during Christmas. So their two stand-alone stores got them 58% of revenue, which includes a lot of operational cost and the online sales got them 42% with just advertising and management cost.