Mirai Clinical Reduces nCAC by 35% via Smarter Exclusions with WasteNot

Challenge

Mirai Clinical is a female soap and bodywash brand focused on older demographics with specific skincare needs. As a growing brand targeting a niche demographic, Mirai's new customer growth was plateauing because an increasing share of their ad budget was being wasted on existing customers. In a D2C category as competitive as beauty and skincare, there is no greater impediment to growth than burning ad spend on existing customers and non-incremental conversions.

Mirai had tried multiple tactics for excluding existing customers from their paid ad campaigns, including site tags, CAPIs, setting budget caps for existing customers, and syncing CRM user lists to their ad accounts. 

Even with these “solutions” in place, Mirai’s data revealed that approximately 45% of their ad spend was being allocated to past customers, accounting for a staggering 80% of ad-attributed conversions for top of funnel campaigns.

“As a leading brand in a niche category, we were frustrated by more of our ads hitting repeat buyers because exclusions weren’t working.” - Koko Hayashi, CEO of Mirai Clinical

This confirms what many of the top voices in D2C ecommerce have said recently regarding native exclusion workflows being ineffective.

Solution

Mirai partnered with WasteNot to address what they saw as their primary blocker to growth. 

WasteNot empowers DTC marketers to define ad exclusions and connect them to major ad platforms such as Meta, Google Ads without any development work. Marketers can set up dynamic exclusions down to the ad level across all of their ad platforms in just a few clicks, excluding 70% more mistargeted users than traditional exclusion methods on average. 

Mirai discovered through their analytics provider, TripleWhale, that past customers and warm audiences (like website visitors and email subscribers) were buying at the same rate whether they saw Mirai’s ads or not. This meant that Mirai was wasting ad budget on people who didn’t need ads to convert, instead of reaching new audiences who could drive real growth.

With WasteNot, Mirai took action to fix this. Mirai connected their existing marketing stack (Shopify and Klaviyo) and ad accounts (Meta and Google) to WasteNot, then defined specific exclusion criteria for individual campaigns and ad groups through the platform’s codeless point-and-click interface, activating a customized exclusion strategy within minutes and without the need for engineering resources. As a result, Mirai’s ad spend became more effective, driving incremental purchases from new buyers and boosting overall growth without increasing their budget.

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Results

Within just one month of launching exclusions with WasteNot, Mirai saw an astounding 140% increase in web visitors and a 35.3% decrease in new customer acquisition costs (nCAC). All while actually decreasing overall spend by 5%.

"WasteNot slashed our customer acquisition costs by almost 40% in less than 30 days. Our exclusions weren’t working, but WasteNot completely fixed that, giving us confidence to scale smarter.” - Koko Hayashi, CEO of Mirai Clinical

In addition to improvements in campaign efficiency, Mirai’s new ad exclusions led to significant benefits in overall business performance. The brand's marketing efficiency ratio increased 20% after just a month of running exclusions with WasteNot, which helped drive a 37% increase in net profits.

Conclusion

For D2C brands struggling to acquire new customers, Google and Meta ad spend can function as the tollbooth instead of the highway to growth, primarily because legacy exclusion methods have become ineffective.

WasteNot’s sole mission is to solve this problem of ineffective exclusions and return control of budgets back to the Advertiser. Mirai Clinical’s outstanding results are a testament to the performance that exclusions that actually work, as provided by WasteNot, can have on the spend efficiency and growth for any DTC ecommerce brand.

For more information on how WasteNot can help your business, you can explore the platform for free.