Pair of Thieves + MuteSix: Email & Social Growth

Pair of Thieves, a rapidly growing ecommerce brand, was looking to increase market share in a highly competitive category. They enlisted the expertise of Klaviyo agency partner, MuteSix who used the combined power of email and social platforms to help Pair of Thieves extend their brand reach, acquire new buyers, and better retain existing customers.

Pair of Thieves is not your average basics brand selling socks and underwear. Rather, they strive to make basics a lot less basic and have built a memorable, enigmatic brand that defines and differentiates itself through humor and viral marketing.

Co-founded by Cash Warren, husband of actress Jessica Alba, Pair of Thieves started to gain some traction when a video of Alba talking about the socks and underwear on Jimmy Kimmel Live! went viral. But the increased awareness wasn’t leading to increased sales. So, Pair of Thieves turned to MuteSix, a direct response digital agency that specializes in Facebook, paid search and email marketing.

Led by Arturo (Art) Villalobos, Head of Facebook Advertising, and Jason Boehle, Head of Email Marketing, the team at MuteSix worked hand-in-hand with Pair of Thieves to extend their reach, acquire new buyers, and better retain existing customers using Facebook Advertising and Klaviyo.

The Challenge

Pair of Thieves had made a splash with their clever marketing and high-quality products.  As they grew to be a national brand, the company recognized that they faced some significant competition and needed to differentiate themselves in a highly-competitive market.

“When Pair of Thieves first came to us, they wanted more sales. Whether selling underwear or selling socks, the sales were what was really driving them,” said Art. “They wanted to take a chunk out of their biggest competitor, who pretty much dominates the space.”

To take on the leaders in their space and acquire more sales, Pair of Thieves needed to get more strategic about their marketing. They were doing some basic advertising through Facebook and email marketing through Mailchimp, but they needed to take their marketing to the next level and get more targeted with their efforts. They wanted to find a way to not only acquire new subscribers, but retain and drive more sales from each customer.

“One of their biggest challenges was that they wanted to grow their email list,” said Art. “When they signed on they had about 10,000 subscribers. They knew they needed many more to make more sales and grow the business.”

The Solution

MuteSix dove right in to ensure that Pair of Thieves saw some early successes from their engagement. They know it’s important to show clients that they understand their goals and can help them achieve, or even exceed those goals very quickly. “We’re very performance-based, and so we focus on the bottom line.” Jason explained,  “Everybody’s bottom line is slightly different, but at the end of the day, it’s all about revenue. So all of our channels are really focused on maximizing that for our clients.”

“The first thing we do when we get an account is make sure that there is a ‘top of the funnel,’ a ‘middle of the funnel,’ and a ‘bottom of the funnel.’ And what I mean by that is ‘top of funnel’ is getting people to visit their site who have never heard of them or purchased from them. ‘Middle of the funnel’ are those who have engaged with their ads but have not purchased for any reason. ‘Bottom of the funnel’ is people that have gone to their site, heavily considered buying such as adding items to a cart but haven’t actually gotten around to it yet,” Art explains. “Then, we focus our efforts on hitting people in every stage, with the appropriate messages to get them to take action and make a purchase.”

In order to make sure those messages were seen by the right people at the right time, MuteSix had to ensure the Pair of Thieves team had the right tools in place to help them execute. One of the first things they did was migrate Pair of Thieves’ email marketing off of Mailchimp and onto Klaviyo. Klaviyo’s deep integration to Facebook Advertising allowed MuteSix to use the two channels side-by-side, and allowed them to play off of each other seamlessly.

Switching things up

More than just adding new tools to the Pair of Thieves technology stack, MuteSix wanted to shake things up a bit and encouraged Pair of Thieves to start looking at their business a little differently.

“They started off as a sock company, that’s their name ‘Pair of Thieves.’” Art explained. “And they saw underwear as kind of like an add-on item. But it was actually the reverse. Most people purchased underwear, especially with the technology that Pair of Thieves has with their two different fabrics. We said to them ‘People are buying your socks, but it looks like more of an add-on. The main selling point here is your underwear and the fabrics and how amazing they actually are.’ So we turned it around on them. We avoided the content with socks and just started talking about underwear.”

Tackling that head-on helped Pair of Thieves restructure their company and get more sales.

Top of funnel

To grow the Pair of Thieves customer base, MuteSix needed to increase brand awareness and drive people to visit their website. Pair of Thieves had great viral videos, but there was no direct response element to them. MuteSix took the Alba/Kimmel video and added a direct response, showing the socks and underwear and sending people to the Pair of Thieves website to check out the products. Unsurprisingly, it worked.

From there, the MuteSix team worked hand-in-hand with the Pair of Thieves team to create additional campaigns and videos they could use in Facebook advertising. They stayed true to the Pair of Thieves brand with the same type of bold messaging that the brand had become known for. The MuteSix team spent a lot of time monitoring the comments and conversations being generated by the videos they were producing, and then using the insights they gathered to inform future email campaigns.

We focus our efforts on hitting people in every stage, with the appropriate messages to get them to take action and make a purchase.

Art Villalobos, Head of Facebook Advertising, MuteSix

For instance, they started to notice that people were talking about the underwear and whether or not Pair of Thieves underwear had an opening for men to use when going to the restroom. The discussion around this topic got pretty humorous with some people claiming they had never realized what that opening was for. MuteSix wanted to take advantage of that buzz and developed a new ad series that stated “Pair of Thieves. Our underwear has the fly.”

But videos only work if they bring people to the site and MuteSix wanted to ensure they were spending the ad dollars on people who were most likely to buy. Instead of targeting their competitor’s customers as Pair of Thieves had been doing previously, MuteSix used Klaviyo segments to build look-alike audiences around the most profitable customers. “We focused on building look-alike audiences around people that had purchased multiple times from Pair of Thieves, or people that had added X number of items to their cart. Even if they didn’t purchase, that to me shows a lot of intent,” explained Art.

Middle of funnel

Once a prospect landed on the site, MuteSix needed to ensure they captured their email address so they could continue to move them down the funnel. Pair of Thieves had a typical newsletter signup, but MuteSix knew they could get better results with additional tools and tactics.

Jason explained, “We spent a lot of time in the beginning really optimizing the pop-up. What we found is that having a full-screen email form takeover where we give users the opportunity to get free socks was the biggest winner in terms of acquiring new subscribers.” And the results were impressive. The full-screen takeover yielded a 15% conversion rate and, in a matter of months, Pair of Thieves opt-in email list grew from 10,000 to over 85,000 subscribers.

Klaviyo’s integration for Facebook’s Custom Audiences allowed Pair of Thieves to integrate their email marketing efforts with their advertising efforts on Facebook to continue to move people down the funnel. The integration allowed them to retarget subscribers who had viewed specific products or abandoned a shopping cart and win back inactive email subscribers.

We use Klaviyo to create segments that can better target the people we want to reach.

Art Villalobos, Head of Facebook Advertising, MuteSix

“When it comes to Facebook and email, Facebook Audiences are very important,” said Jason. “And we use Klaviyo to create segments that can better target the people we want to reach. It’s really helpful that Klaviyo automatically syncs up and I don’t have to go in and constantly re-create the lists. When you have data synced up real-time, instead of once-a-day, or once-a-month, it’s going to be more relevant, which is only going to help the spend and lower the CPA.”

Bottom of funnel

With Klaviyo in place, MuteSix could not only strengthen their Facebook Advertising, they could take Pair of Thieves email marketing automation to the next-level.

“Pair of Thieves was using MailChimp in very minimal flows,” said Jason. “We wanted to be able to integrate the email marketing system with something that would give us direct dollar metrics. We knew Klaviyo could help us do that.”

They started by overhauling their Welcome Series, to play off of the pop-up that was capturing email addresses. They added in product recommendations and up-sells to the emails based on what somebody had viewed or purchased. They also overhauled their abandoned cart series.

From a email design standpoint, they brought the Pair of Thieves brand to life in their emails to help people connect with the brand and to tell the story in a more compelling way.

Taking it to the next-level

Getting customers to make their first purchase was key, but even more important was continuing to drive future purchases from these customers. To acquire the first-time buyers, MuteSix and Pair of Thieves were targeting a 1:1.15 return on ad spend (ROAS). The idea being to spend more money up-front to acquire a new customer, and then be smart about retaining that customer and increasing the profit margin by making sure they make subsequent purchases.

One of the tactics employed was a buy one fabric, get the other fabric free initial offer. Pair of Thieves offered two key fabrics in their underwear and they wanted customers to try both. Then, they would send post-purchase emails asking customers which fabric they liked better and prompting them to buy more. They could also target these now-customers on Facebook with ads that reminded them of the items they had purchased and suggested similar products.

Klaviyo also allowed MuteSix to be smarter with the targeting and segmentation of their ads. At one point, Pair of Thieves was running low on inventory of larger sizes. So, they ran ads only targeting people who had purchased small or medium sizes, to ensure they had the inventory to keep customers happy. Knowing that Klaviyo segments are updated in real-time allows MuteSix to spend less time managing lists and more time coming up with creative, cutting-edge ideas that will move the needle.

The Results

With MuteSix driving the overhauled email and advertising strategy, Pair of Thieves began to see impressive growth. Most ecommerce companies would be thrilled with doubling their revenue. In 2017, Pair of Thieves’ year over year revenue increased by 5x!

Their paid social campaigns, particularly those on Facebook, crushed previous results. Thanks in large part to the humorous videos that MuteSix produced and the diligent management of their ad spend, Pair of Thieves was able to reach $1:$1.15 return on ad spend (ROAS), and keep it there.

Email has brought impressive results:

• Pair of Thieves’ email list size grew from 10,000 to 85,000 opt-in names in a matter of months.
• In the past 30 days, 42% of revenue is coming from email.
• In the past 30 days, 25% of their revenue is entirely automated, coming from flows.

As for Klaviyo’s impact on bottom line results, the numbers speak for themselves. Pair of Thieves has a 60X ROI on Klaviyo – for every $1 spent on Klaviyo, Pair of Thieves earns $60.