Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about traffic for the Shopify website. What strategy did you follow to drive traffic?

Hannah Fastov: After we launched our Shopify website, we started to engage with a digital advertising agency. I worked closely with them to develop this strategy of how we are going to get people to our website. We focused on Instagram and Facebook, more Facebook at that time. What we learned is that, like you mentioned earlier, who our customer was. It’s so important to define your demographic. For us, we felt like we were all over the place.

Our demographic was a little bit older. At that time, I was 25. I thought she was like me in New York city living her best life. She was a little bit older. More like 27 to 30. She was more of a suburbanite. She’s super active in terms of her lifestyle. She was doing a million things during the day. She may have a career or may be a stay-at-home mom.

Her day would start at 6AM. She would drop off kids, go to meeting, go to tennis, meet up with friends for lunch. Just all over the place. She values the quality of a product over designer name. She had a youthful energy and spirit. That became the core of how we define our demographic. That’s how we portray this woman.

Sramana Mitra: How do you do that in Facebook? Facebook allows you to target by age. That is doable. What other parameters could you target around to get to that demographic that you just described?

Hannah Fastov: It has changed tremendously over the last six years. When you set up a profile on Facebook or login to your Google account, it’s tracking everything that you do. Within Facebook when you’re setting up your campaigns, there’re all different parameters like behavior. Do you like to shop online? What type of things are you shopping for? Are you interested in fitness or travel? What type of career do you have?

For us, we put together three profiles of people that we want to target. Our top of the funnel was broader. At that time, it was easier and more affordable to do this. We focus across the US. She’s between 25 and 55. She is interested in online shopping. Some of the other stores that she’s interested in is Lululemon or Nordstrom. She’s interested in travel.

Then you put a Pixel on your website that connects to Facebook so you can track your user activity. Then we had our top of funnel and then we had our mid funnel for anyone who had come to the website before or interacted with the brand in some way. We would target them with a slightly different ad campaign. The first one is a little bit broader and introducing the brand.

The next one is a little bit more specific. What makes our bags different and better? Then there’s the bottom of the funnel. We focus more on AI types of campaigns where whatever product they had looked at, that would be the one that would show up in their feed as well as a couple of other products in other colors or similar styles.

Sramana Mitra: This was still in 2017?

Hannah Fastov: Yes, into 2018.

Sramana Mitra: Did Facebook already have Lookalike audiences?

Hannah Fastov: Yes, that’s a really great tool for us.

Sramana Mitra: You have a Pixel tracking what is converting. You can do a Lookalike audience on that.

Hannah Fastov: Exactly.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building a Fashion E-commerce Business and Surviving Covid: Go Dash Dot CEO Hannah Fastov
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