How a D2C Mattress Brand Recovered High-Intent Visitors and Proved Incremental ROAS

Mattresses are not an impulse purchase. The typical customer researches across multiple sessions, compares brands, reads reviews, and deliberates for days or weeks before committing. This means that even visitors arriving with genuine purchase intent will almost always leave the site before converting on their first visit.

For the client, this was a structural problem compounded by the cost of acquisition. Paid search in the mattress category is highly competitive, with CPCs that make every bounced visitor expensive. Existing retargeting channels, primarily paid social and display, were reaching a declining share of visitors as cookie deprecation and iOS privacy changes eroded match rates. The client had no email-based mechanism to re-engage browsers who had not yet reached the cart, which represented the large majority of their site traffic.

Optivo was deployed across the client’s full website, with specific attention to visitors who landed on the homepage, navigated through product pages, but did not reach the cart. This pre-cart behaviour is characteristic of the deliberation phase in high-AOV categories and represented the highest-value audience to recover.

When those visitors bounced, Optivo identified them against esbconnect’s database of 17 million opted-in UK consumers and triggered a time-limited offer email designed to bring them back to site with a compelling reason to act. Every contact reached was net-new to the client’s CRM, unreachable through any existing channel.

A secondary and tertiary email followed for non-converters, shifting the call to action to a lower-commitment entry point: signing up to the client’s database and entering a prize draw. This allowed the sequence to generate CRM value from visitors who were not yet ready to purchase.

To test the true incrementality of the programme, the client applied a holdout group from the outset, withholding Optivo emails from a defined segment of identified visitors. Revenue generated by the retargeted group was then measured against the holdout to isolate Optivo’s contribution from organic return behaviour.

Across the initial test period, Optivo:

• delivered a 11x incremental ROAS, stress-tested against the holdout group and validated as revenue that would not have occurred without the programme
• acquired over 5,000 net-new CRM leads through the secondary email sequence, representing highly qualified prospective customers at a fraction of the cost of paid acquisition
• reached an audience with zero overlap with the client’s existing CRM or paid retargeting audiences, confirming that every result was genuinely incremental

For a brand operating in a category where deliberation is the norm and acquisition costs are high, Optivo demonstrated that the consideration window, far from being a dead zone, is the highest-leverage point in the purchase journey.