Faguo generates 11 times more leads, four times cheaper

This case study is also available in French.

We had the pleasure to chat with Martin Charousset, Head of eCommerce at Faguo. And he explained to us why choosing Wisepops as their new popup software “was the best business decision I made in 2019”.

Faguo is a French fashion brand that creates collections of shoes, clothing, and accessories. The brand’s online store has an average of 100,000+ monthly visitors and generates 5,000+ monthly leads with website popups.

Would you like to know how to achieve this kind of success?

Everything began with a trip. For Frédéric and Nicolas, a journey to China was about more than learning about a new culture. It was an experience that led them to a major idea:

Start a fashion brand that would plant a tree for every item sold. 

The idea was amazing, but the guys had a problem. Succeeding as a fashion brand in France, the world’s second most fashionable country, isn’t exactly a walk in the park.

But they did succeed, nevertheless. Keep reading to learn how.

I will cover these points for you:

1. Faguo: a short story

2. Faguo’s business strategy

3. Challenge: lead generation and marketing automation

4. How Faguo uses Wisepops to grow and serve customers

5. Faguo’s results with Wisepops’ campaigns

6. Tutorial: Replicate Faguo’s most successful campaign

1 . Faguo: A Short Story

During the trip, Frédéric and Nicolas were so inspired by the Chinese entrepreneurial spirit, they decided to start their own business. Back home, they launched a shoe brand for men called “Faguo,” the Chinese word for “France.”

And it was a huge success—the first collection of 5,000 pairs sold out in 15 days!

Now, Faguo is an established fashion brand that:

• Sells many products in over 500 shops in France and worldwide

• Employs 27 awesome individuals who are always dressed to the nines 🙂 

• Planted 1.8+ million trees (you can guess how many items they’ve sold so far 😉

Although the brand operates in shops, the online store remains the channel with the most impressive sales growth and potential.

2. Faguo’s Business Strategy

Frédéric and Nicolas faced unbelievable competition from other French fashion brands, so they had to work twice as hard on their business strategy.

Here are some of its essential pillars:

Target audience: The brand’s target audience is middle-class male customers between the ages of 25 and 45 (Millennials and Gen Xers). Wearing casual clothing made according to the latest fashion trends is very important to this audience.

Customer acquisition: This strategy relies on two channels: Facebook and Google. Besides attracting organic traffic from both sources, the company also invests in paid campaigns.

Brand positioning: (1) Making casual clothes that follow the latest fashion trends, (2) being committed to reducing carbon emissions, and (3) preserving the young and dynamic brand identity.

And this business strategy is working beautifully.

Faguo is now growing faster than ever, getting press coverage from sources like France Today and Forbes.

But…

It wasn’t like that only a year and a half ago. 

Back then, Faguo faced a major growth problem… 

3. The Challenge: Lead Generation and Marketing Automation

It’s 2019.

Martin Charousset, Faguo’s head of eCommerce, leads a two-person marketing team that works on a myriad of ideas to increase traffic and sales on Faguo’s website.

The trio faced a challenge:

How could they attract traffic and capture visitors’ emails to move them down the sales funnel until they’re ready to buy?

Faguo’s website had email signup forms and simple popups for doing these things, but the performance wasn’t satisfactory—around 500 emails a month.

But the challenges didn’t end there.

Martin’s team was using Spread, a marketing app that lacked integration with their CRM, Splio. They had to add every single lead’s information manually.

Martin decided to look for a more advanced popup solution that would integrate with his marketing stack and improve lead generation. He investigated some of the most successful ecommerce brands and found that many of them used Wisepops to generate leads.

At the same time, Martin was reading a Slack channel for eCommerce marketers and DNVB brands that mentioned Wisepops. 

What happened next turned out to be “The best business decision I’ve made in 2019.”

Yep, that was a quote.

4. How Faguo Uses Wisepops to Grow and Serve Customers

Yes, that decision was to install our popup builder, Wisepops!

Martin had three goals for Wisepops popups:

• Lead generation — generate at least 2,000 new leads every month, automatically

• Customer support — Reduce customer support workload by leading customers to answers they needed

• Automation — import lead data from the popups solution to the email marketing app automatically and in real time

Now, let’s see how he achieved these goals with examples of successful popup campaigns.

Campaign #1: Generating Leads with the Spin-to-Win Popup

Inside the Wisepops’ library, Martin chose a spin-the-wheel popup to add some gamification for one of the lead generation campaigns.  Visitors could click the popup to spin a colorful wheel to win a prize: a pair of cool sneakers and free shipping for the next order.

Faguo did an excellent job customizing popup colors and the background that reminds about their commitment to sustainability. Here’s how this beautiful popup looks.

To enter the contest, visitors had to submit their names and emails (Faguo used the names to personalize marketing communications).

So, how many visitors participated and provided their details?

48,146 and counting!

The CTR was an impressive 17.5%, which is way above the average rate of traditional-style popups (around 3.75%).

Here’s the full data from Wisepops’ dashboard. As you can see, Martin used Wisepops’ A/B testing feature to run two campaign variants to see which one worked best.

Campaign #2: Reducing Customer Support Workload with Non-Intrusive Popups

Martin’s team came up with original campaign ideas here.

The first one: the idea of a dedicated popup to guide customers to answers.

Faguo customers needed quick access to FAQs from one place. So, after quick customizations, a special popup appeared on the order confirmation page. Why there? Martin found that many customers tended to submit the same support questions immediately after placing orders.

This nifty popup shared three helpful links to those questions. Those three links lead to the product returns help page, order tracking page, and FAQ page.

Martin chose these three links for a reason. 

The first one helps customers with product returns—it’s a tactic that successful eCommerce brands use for customer loyalty sales. Up to 92% of consumers are more likely to buy again from brands that provide easy product returns.

Next, the order tracking link helps reduce customer support load by assisting with website navigation. For customers, it’s an easy way to track orders, which contributes to a positive brand experience.

The third, the FAQs page link, is also useful for customers to find answers to their questions. This link choice is supported by evidence—Gartner research found that 70% of customers prefer self-service rather than talking to a support agent.

Next customer support campaign:

Faguo’s team was receiving a lot of tickets with questions about how to get product return shipping labels.

So, a special customer support popup was made. It informs customers that if they make a return request, a prepaid shipping label is sent to their email. Just like that, a single popup helped the support team.

Another campaign example…

This popup helps with applying a code from credit notes customers can get in a Faguo shop. The question about applying code was the most common customer support question that Faguo’s team received.

Customers who have the code can easily find out the answer. Plus, there’s a link to the FAQ page in case there are more questions.

That’s not everything…

Faguo used Wisepops to share short announcements with product shipping and return policy information.

The popup below has three important messages: (1) Orders ship in two days, (2) there’s free delivery for orders over €150, and (3) customers can return the product for up to 30 days from the purchase date for free.

Again, this popup made getting important info easy—

That’s so much value for customers.

An important note to add:

All of these popups—or any popup in Wisepops, for that matter—can be customized and launched by one person, with no coding skills.

5. Faguo’s Results with Wisepops’ Campaigns

As I mentioned, collecting emails was the biggest challenge that Faguo faced back in 2019. That’s why they launched popup campaigns to fix the problem.

Here are the results.

In this Wisepops’ dashboard image, you can see how many visitors clicked popups campaigns. At multiple points, popups were clicked by over 8,000 visitors, with the highest number almost reaching 10,000 visitors.

The second image below shows trends in the click-through rate (CTR).

We see a small dip in the beginning when Faguo was experimenting. But once Martin’s team found what customers responded to at the end of March 2020, CTR went up and now stays at about 15%.

And here’s the most important result:

How many emails did Faguo manage to generate with Wisepops?

Popup campaigns started rapid lead generation around April, and the number of new leads skyrocketed to almost 10,000 a few months later. Now, Faguo generates an average of 5,000+ new leads monthly—a huge increase compared to the number of leads collected before Wisepops.

So, the big question:

How can you generate the same results as Faguo?

Let me give you the recipe for success right now.

6. Tutorial: Replicate Faguo’s Most Successful Campaign

Here’s a step-by-step breakdown of how to recreate Faugo’s most successful spin-the-wheel campaign.

The spin-the-wheel popups gained popularity because of their ability to convert between 5% and 20% of visitors. That’s much higher than the conversion rate of traditional popups: 3.75%.

Martin created two separate variants of spin-the-wheel campaigns—for mobile and desktop visitors. To find the best-performing setup, he used A/B testing in Wisepops.

Here’s what both variants look like:

How did the two perform?

Wisepops shows that the CTR in the mobile version is much, much higher. So, it looks like customers who visit Faguo on mobile are more likely to leave email addresses. But on the desktop, Martin has been collecting 2.5x more leads.

Impressive!

Now, here’s how to make a similar spin-the-wheel campaign in Wisepops.

Build a Spin-the-Wheel Lead Generation Campaign

Step 1:

Get Wisepops to get started (its free):

Next, choose a spin-to-win template from the Wisepops template gallery:

Optionally, you can start from scratch and add a wheel option from the main menu.

Step 2:

Choose how many slices to add to your wheel, what you want to name them, what prices to assign to them, and the probability of winning the prize—all in the Slices tab.

Step 3:

As mentioned, Martin was using Splio for email marketing. At this step, we need to sync Wisepops with your own email marketing app to send captured data in real time and trigger email marketing automation flows.

Find your app from the list of Wisepops’ integrations in the Sync tab.

Step 4:

In the Fields tab, choose and prepare fields and data to collect and send to your marketing app and/or CRM.

You can also add the hidden fields on the form to know exactly which leads you acquire with Wisepops.

The Hidden field section is where you can assign a specific attribute for campaign differentiation—see below.

Step 5:

Choose the CTA button. Martin chose one word: “JOUER” (French for “Spin to Win”). It fits perfectly with the gamification theme. You can use any words you want, but remember to keep your CTA short and action-oriented.

Step 6:

Make sure that your campaign has the GDPR disclaimer to comply with data privacy and protection laws.

Step 7:

Customize the thank-you page that appears after a spin. Specifically, choose the prize and give the coupon code to the lucky visitor.

Step 8:

Upload a custom background for the popup and choose the Full screen option. Faguo used a background image of a beautiful forest, which emphasizes their commitment to reducing carbon emissions.

Step 9:

Configure popup display options to show the campaign to the right visitors at the right time.

Wisepops has 30+ visitor targeting options, and the time spent on the website is one of the most often used. This option ensures that visitors don’t get “bombarded” with popups immediately after they land on a page.

Martin decided to display the popup 10 seconds after visitors arrived at the page. Note: It wasn’t his first choice, but rather a perfect time discovered after experimenting.

We also need to ensure that visitors who leave their email don’t get a second request. In the Frequency tab, choose to stop displaying the popup after one display, or when a visitor has already left their email in another campaign.

Note: If you have the same campaign running on mobile devices, make sure they don’t overlap and visitors don’t get multiple requests.

Important note: 

Martin excluded 21 website pages from this campaign because Faguo has many subpages, and displaying popups everywhere would mean showing them to visitors who have already made a purchase, etc.

As I pointed out, Martin made separate popup campaigns for desktop and mobile devices. So he used the Audience tab in Wisepops—there, you can define the devices to include/exclude from popup campaigns.

Another cool thing I’d like to mention is that Martin also excluded Faguo store visitors from his email marketing campaigns. 

Here’s why:

In most cases, these were the customers who signed up via the spin-the-wheel popup campaign. So, there was no point in showing this popup to them for the second time.

To exclude these visitors, Martin used the UTM option from the Traffic section (the Audience tab), which allows adding custom UTM parameters in URLs.

I’d just like to say…

Martin did a wonderful job with this popup campaign. One thing I’d advise to get even better results: Use the language option.

This way, you can display the campaign only to visitors using the French version of the browser, and prepare the English version for all other visitors.

That’s it! The campaign is ready to go! Now you know all that went into Martin’s successful lead generation campaign.

Would you like to try creating a similar campaign for your business?

Wisepops comes with a risk-free 14-day trial, so you’ve got nothing to lose—but potentially thousands of new leads to gain!