How CandleScience Lit Up its Holiday Sales With Connected TV
Q4 is a fruitful time for many businesses. However, with every advertiser vying for consumers’ attention, the holiday season can also be extremely competitive.
CandleScience, a candle and soap making supplies company, added a new performance channel to its marketing mix to remain top of mind with shoppers leading up to and through the holidays. Thanks to its ability to reach niche audiences and its high level of measurability, connected TV (CTV) proved to be just what CandleScience needed to increase new business through the end of 2023 and beyond.
Performance Burns Bright on CTV
CandleScience helps creatives, DIYers, and entrepreneurs make candles, soaps and scented creations. As a company in the very crowded e-commerce space (particularly during Q4), it was focused on introducing candle and soap making to DIY audiences that the company hadn’t previously been able to reach via other channels.
With two primary personas to market to — DIY enthusiasts and small business candle makers — it was vital that CandleScience's ads consistently reached the right potential customers. MNTN Performance TV enabled CandleScience to accurately engage with the most relevant CTV audiences, driving a significant uptick in new business.
Developing a Robust CTV Approach With MNTN Performance TV
The first step to ensuring the strength of its CTV campaigns came in the form of a comprehensive audience strategy. MNTN’s unique audience suite gave CandleScience access to thousands of niche groups — e.g., arts and crafts shoppers, DIY millennials, and candle and soap making enthusiasts — to ensure the retailer reached people who fit its distinct customer personas.
Heading into the pivotal dates of Black Friday through Cyber Monday, CandleScience tripled its daily CTV spend. This grew its audience pool and increased consumer engagement, allowing the brand to tackle the most competitive time of the holiday season head on.
Another integral part of CandleScience’s Q4 CTV approach was relevant and engaging ad creative. While it already had compelling advertisements, it needed a little extra support to ensure its creative was holiday ready. CandleScience turned to video production marketplace QuickFrame to support its needs by using existing CandleScience videos to create new holiday-focused advertisements.
These ads painted a clear picture of CandleScience’s value proposition, featuring imagery of people using the company’s specialized kits to make their own candles at home. To ensure peak viewer engagement, CandleScience used in-ad copy to highlight special promotions. As a cherry on top, the ads wrapped up with a call to action, driving viewers to the brand's website to take advantage of free holiday shipping.
CandleScience Sees Significant Improvement of Key Metrics Throughout Q4
Using MNTN’s fully customizable in-platform reporting, CandleScience accurately tracked Q4 campaign performance — and it was thrilled with what it saw.
Scaling budget from Black Friday through the end of November paid off — the number of households reached jumped by 164 percent and Verified Visits™ grew by 74 percent.
While CandleScience initially turned to MNTN to increase brand awareness, it became clear that CTV could also produce lower-funnel results. With MNTN it was able to beat its Q4 return on advertising spend (ROAS) goal by 918 percent. Quarter-over-quarter, CandleScience’s cost per visit (CPV) and cost per acquisition (CPA) decreased by 12 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
By strategically reaching highly relevant audiences on CTV and integrating compelling holiday-focused creatives, CandleScience was able to set a new benchmark for its advertising success, underscoring the power of CTV in driving both brand awareness and lower-funnel performance. In 2024, CandleScience continued to exceed its ROAS goals by making CTV an integral piece of its overall integrated paid media strategy, proving that with the right tools and approach, even the most competitive seasons can yield impactful outcomes.
Tim Edmundson is the senior director of content and research at MNTN, a connected TV performance marketing platform.
Tim Edmundson is the senior director of content at MNTN, where he oversees research, thought leadership and analysis of the streaming television and media ecosystem.
