Starting traditional

Raghav Somani didn’t have e-commerce in mind when he launched the first Headphone Zone retail store in 2012.

Raghav, who had grown up playing the guitar and synthesizer, wanted to create a dedicated space for audiophiles to explore.

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Raghav knew his ideal customers were more likely to buy headphones based on firsthand experience rather than other customers’ reviews.

He wasn’t wrong. And by the end of the first year, there were six Headphone Zone stores across Chennai, Bengaluru and Mumbai.

Offline to online

The honeymoon period lasted for about 2 years. Like several other offline retail stores, Headphone Zone faced issues of scalability, range and manpower, especially restricted by location.

Audiophiles were everywhere. But they could only be reached via third party e-commerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart.

Headphone Zone wanted their own brand, their own story, and more importantly—a bigger customer base.

In the midst of the e-commerce boom of 2014, Headphone Zone decided to go online—landing straight into the global headphones market.

The move was perfect. Now they aren’t just India’s premiere headphones retail brand, they also boast the largest collection of headphones and earphones across South Asia.

Branding it right

What makes Headphone Zone stand out is their exclusive brand identity. Combining fashion, technology and entertainment, their unique retail experience exclusively nurtures customer lifetime value.

High value headphones aren’t purchased on a whim.

Fully aware of this, Headphone Zone created a funnel where they concentrated on building and sustaining customer trust. Once that was established, they could upsell to customers keeping in line with their hobbies and needs.

Eventually, visitors turn into fans and social media channels become an interactive base for audio content, as well as product launches.

Facebook Advertising

What's digital marketing without Facebook advertising?

But when Headphone Zone tried Facebook ads, they found it impossible to brand themselves within the restrictive Facebook ads format.

Raghav had heard about Socioh through the founder of SR Store, whose ROAS had increased 10x with Socioh’s Branded Catalogs.

At Socioh, we realized that it was important to align Headphone Zone’s ads performance with the brand’s marketing objectives.

The problem they faced was two-fold.

1. The right retargeting message wasn’t going through

Headphone Zone sells high end products. Most customers don’t add more than one headphone to their cart.

This makes it counterproductive to retarget ATC (Add-to-cart) audience with a carousel of headphones they are probably not interested in.

In such a scenario, the only thing that would work is showing them a DPA (Dynamic Product Ad) in link ad format. This means targeting each ATC customer with a single image ad of the product they have added to cart.

However, when Headphone Zone set a DPA link ad, it looked like this:

Potential customers were lost because no one wanted to click on an ad like this.

The Socioh Solution:

Most of Headphone Zone’s product images are vertical, which means link ads (which are rectangular) would always render them cropped and distorted.

At Socioh, we removed the background from the product images. Then, a catalog of 1200x628 dimension was created to fit the link ad format. Here, we added Headphone Zone’s logo and adjusted the background and gradient according to their brand colors.

The result was this:

Imagine a customer who browsed 20 products, picked out 1 for her cart, and got caught up with work before she could checkout the item. The next time she logs onto Facebook, she will be targeted with a perfectly rendered ad for the carted headphone. Eye-catching, branded, no distortion, and instant.

Headphone Zone was able to generate link ads for DPA with just a few clicks, saving hours of work.

2. Carousel ads were getting boring

Unlike apparel, headphones look the same. Which makes carousel ads look increasingly alike. How do you make sure your audience doesn’t suffer from creative fatigue when you’re pitching products like headphones to them?

The Socioh Solution:

With our background removal software, we made sure Headphone Zone's catalogs for carousel ads were customized with the brand’s colors and gradients, so they could generate creatives that stood out.

So when potential customers were targeted, they got to see this:

By creating ad catalogs that automatically mapped product, price and logo right on the ad graphic itself, Socioh improved Headphone Zone’s brand recall and identity.

Moving forward

The CTR (click-through-rate) and conversion on the ads immediately shot up. The creatives made sure the brand was easily recognized and identified by the target audience segment.

Socioh continues to work with Headphone Zone, tackling ad creative fatigue and tapping into undiscovered audience segments for powerful retargeting.

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