Building an online plant store from scratch to a market leader

“I made the right decision when choosing which agency to leave the reins of our online ads to. They have been with us since the start of the online store and it’s really nice to watch us all grow together. In all of this, I especially appreciate their professionalism, responsiveness, reliability and an exceptional sense for communication.”

TJAŠA JARC, FOUNDER OF
DZUNGLA PLANTS

About the brand

Dzungla-plants.com is one of the first online stores for rare and exotic indoor plants and accessories for plant care in Slovenia.

Its founders Tjaša and Tylen wanted to bring indoor plants to the Slovenian consumers, and this idea led to an online store, eventually also a brick and mortar shop and a very solid B2B service.

After its pre-launch in july 2020 it quickly gained traction and they called us to help them with performance marketing.

We wanted to offer rare and exotic plants to the Slovenian market and noticed that you couldn’t really get them. We saw the opportunity and went for it. Also, I think all of the COVID sanctions were beneficiary for us because people were forced to stay at home and the plants one of those things you start missing in your home. They became trendy.

Tjaša Jarc, the founder of Dzungla Plants

The challenge

As with every new product on the market, there is always uncertainty on where to put your performance bets. We were always a fan of testing, but in this case we understood that testing is simply going to be an ongoing process for months to come. Primarily, we asked ourselves the following questions:

• What channel should we bet on?
• What creatives work best in the industry?
• What offer tweaks will help increase the conversion rates?
• What average order value are we aiming for?

As the newly arrived plants have been finding its way to new customers every day, we had to find ways on how to find new customers.

From the beginning, the brand has started from scratch and both co-founders did a great job on social media and content building to support all brand related efforts.

They build the social channels (Facebook and Instagram) organically to 10k followers in a short period of time, which allowed us to really focus on the performance side of the store and helped us utilise the content in all advertising efforts.

“We wanted to grow fast and knew early on that we need professionals for that. Someone that will help us set up the whole marketing process. We didn’t want to do this on our own in the beginning."

Tjaša Jarc, the founder of Dzungla Plants

The process

1. Building the brand

The founders knew what they were doing from the very beginning. With a design and a community management background, they consistently pushed their communication with customers on their social media accounts. This helped them get a lot of information on what they can improve, what type of plants are they still missing and what type of ads do they really need to show to people.

All this user feedback helped us prepare the Facebook creatives and generate ideas for further banner and video content we wanted to push out.

2. Setting up the channels (FB, Google, mailing)

Multi-channel strategy from the beginning helped us increase sales to 5 digit numbers in 3 months. But the best was that it kept on growing every month, with overall store ROAS numbers between 11 and 15.

A lot of testing was done on Facebook, which helped us tailor the creatives to specific audiences. For instance, long, informative videos were better for cold traffic, while static images were much better for converting to purchases.

Expanding the audience was the biggest challenge. Buying exotic plants online was still in its infancy in Slovenia when the brand was launched. Our strategy was to keep our offer really engaging and interesting to keep people coming back to our social media, website and newsletters.

We weren’t big fans of discounts, except for stock cleaning, which meant we had to be really creative with special deals or packages that kept our ROAS numbers above 6.

3. Relentless on creatives

After the first couple of months we’ve had enough data to start segmenting our audiences better. User feedback, together with some important LTV data from Klaviyo, helped us define user personas to the extent where we could tailor the creatives specifically to their needs.

We knew that the audiences were not that big and a lot of them will have to see our ads multiple times. This pivoted our strategy from ‘buy now’ ads to creating valuable content for them.

For instance, we knew that getting the plant was just the first step of the Džungla experience. After buying the plants, the customers had to take of their new, green babies and we set up a lot of remarketing funnels with different valuable content that educated the customers about how to water the plants, transplant them or take care of infections.

The whole advertising experience to someone online basically looked like a very knowledgable content on social media that is usually used in posts or stories. This helped us make our advertising efforts very organic and natural, which was essential at high frequency advertising.

This helped us retain high ad CTR’s, between 2% and 4% and CPCs below industry standards.

4. Expanding to new markets

After Slovenia, we launched the brand to Croatia with a very similar strategy but tailored it to the market specifics. Since indoor plants are mostly being bought by people that live in apartments, we had to target the city population, which predominantly meant Zagreb, followed by Split, Rijeka and Zadar.

The pre-launch was lead by a lead-gen campaign, where we got 1,000+ contacts.

An important aspect was also localising the creatives. Since a lot of marketing efforts were based on valuable video content, we made localising this content with a native speaker a top priority.

“Croatia was a similar market to Slovenia and just about a year behind the emerging trends in Slovenia so it was easy for us to copy/paste the existing model to the other market. Italy on the other hand was a lot more developed market, so we had to to a lot more research and strategize before launching there.”

Tjaša Jarc, the founder of Dzungla Plants

Conclusion

Besides operating the e-commerce store in Slovenia, Croatia and Italy, Dzungla Plants is now a successful retail brand with a solid B2B service, selling and fitting out offices and private homes.

It was an exciting and hard-working journey to help build an idea to a 12+ employee business and we’re grateful we were being trusted with the marketing side of things to keep the business profitable.

For more insights on how to approach your e-commerce or SaaS growth check our blog.

“Working with Bighead allowed us to really focus on running our business. They were taking care of our performance and marketing activities and the biggest value for us was that generating sales was suddenly someone elses responsibility”.

Tjaša Jarc, the founder of Dzungla Plants