Mastery of a craft occurs when it is: Repeatable, measurable, dependable and profitable. What better way to prove excellence and mastery than to offer clients self-funded marketing campaigns?
Case Study: Group travel tour company (pre -COVID)
Pre-Covid-19, a Sydney-based group travel tour company needed to reduce its dependency on promotional voucher companies Scoopon, Groupon and Luxury Escapes that generated almost 100% of its sales. The tour company wanted to reduce its risk while at the same time create economies of scale to optimise tour offering efficiencies to maximise profits, not possible with the bargain-hunting, discount-hungry online voucher buyers.
UEC approached the problem from an interestingly refreshing perspective – create a self-funding campaign based on a fully transparent data feedback loop synonymous with high performance athletic training– Deliberate Practice Principles.
The original investment was A$50,000
and the timeline for break-even
return of the capital was 3 months.
The first step was to undertake the necessary audits to clearly identify the opportunities available and the specific Personas who could be profitably targeted via Facebook. It’s worthy to note a Google campaign had been attempted by the tour company, but the scale needed for a self-funding campaign was mathematically unachievable; more on that later.
The campaign was launched with one Landing Page for one destination (country/itinerary).
This was necessary to validate all the presuppositions and achieve the much-needed critical mass.
Advanced quantitative analysis, the cornerstone of the Deliberate Practice Principles to create a seemingly impossible outcome, required thatLanding Page Optimisation (LPO) include the combined split testing of multiple versions of social media ads as well as different versions of the landing page, creating a mathematical complexity that was reconciled manually with the live tracking of all metrics in one single dashboard setup ‘in the cloud’ via a secure Google Drive worksheet.
The initial results were dismal, but expected. With all the moving parts that needed to be orchestrated and coordinated, it would have been pure luck to get to the ideal combination on the first go.
Undeterred, UEC and the client collaborated via the fully transparent reporting mechanism in place, Reversing For Results dynamically, live and interactively. The dialogue between the First Contact Team (FCT) and UEC’s creative UX/UI designers happened organically throughout the day, into the early evenings and even on weekends. The detailed analysis included determining the best times and place to call prospects (work versus home) as well as the content of the call;a first contact call versus a call-back to discuss specific itinerary details.
Everything was questioned and tested. From opening phrases on the phone to headlines and images used in the Facebook ads. The iterative nature of the DPP was, at first, quite overwhelming for the FCT supervisor to handle.But within a few days, she was able to get in sync with the UX and UI revisions and direct the sales team members to adjust and refine their approach. She was like a coach providing feedback to an elite athlete as he/she adjusts one element of a stroke or movement to gain efficiency or effectiveness.
The first few sales proved hard to get, but the first breakthrough came to light when a key buying red flag was uncovered: The need to reinforce the legitimacy of the Tour Group company so the traveller felt confident and secure that the funds to be transferred to secure their trip were safe until travel would occur, up to a year later.
With that psychological barrier removed, sales increased – but still not sufficiently for the campaign to self-fund itself. Self-funding was defined as the sales made in the promotion period, in this instance it was one (7-day) week paying for the promotional advertising budget out of the net gross profit margin (in this case, 20%) or maximum Cost Of Sale (COS) percentage.
For this campaign to be self-funded, for a $10,000/week media budget, sales needed to be $50,000 at a COS/margin of 20% = $10,000. That’s where the next obstacle presented itself. To make $50,000 in sales, using Facebook with its scattergun approach to lead generation, meant that we had to attract $250,000 of prospective travellers to close 20% or $50,000 of sales.The Average Order Value (AOV) of $2,500 with +/-2.5 people per travel group meant that the FCT had to talk to +-100 travel groups per week, which with two salespeople was just not humanly possible.
Once two additional salespeople were hired, the campaign reached its critical mass and the campaign went on to generate a whopping $4 million in sales with an AOV $1,000 higher than the voucher promotions with double the net bottom line profit.
If you would like to be the next successful case study, mastering RAW DATA with Exponential Marketing Strategies that create out-of-the-ordinary results like this, contact UEC by clicking here.
Advanced quantitative analysis, the cornerstone of the Deliberate Practice Principles to create a seemingly impossible outcome, required thatLanding Page Optimisation (LPO) include the combined split testing of multiple versions of social media ads as well as different versions of the landing page, creating a mathematical complexity that was reconciled manually with the live tracking of all metrics in one single dashboard setup ‘in the cloud’ via a secure Google Drive worksheet.
The initial results were dismal, but expected. With all the moving parts that needed to be orchestrated and coordinated, it would have been pure luck to get to the ideal combination on the first go.
Undeterred, UEC and the client collaborated via the fully transparent reporting mechanism in place, Reversing For Results dynamically, live and interactively. The dialogue between the First Contact Team (FCT) and UEC’s creative UX/UI designers happened organically throughout the day, into the early evenings and even on weekends. The detailed analysis included determining the best times and place to call prospects (work versus home) as well as the content of the call;a first contact call versus a call-back to discuss specific itinerary details.
Everything was questioned and tested. From opening phrases on the phone to headlines and images used in the Facebook ads. The iterative nature of the DPP was, at first, quite overwhelming for the FCT supervisor to handle.But within a few days, she was able to get in sync with the UX and UI revisions and direct the sales team members to adjust and refine their approach. She was like a coach providing feedback to an elite athlete as he/she adjusts one element of a stroke or movement to gain efficiency or effectiveness.
The first few sales proved hard to get, but the first breakthrough came to light when a key buying red flag was uncovered: The need to reinforce the legitimacy of the Tour Group company so the traveller felt confident and secure that the funds to be transferred to secure their trip were safe until travel would occur, up to a year later.
With that psychological barrier removed, sales increased – but still not sufficiently for the campaign to self-fund itself. Self-funding was defined as the sales made in the promotion period, in this instance it was one (7-day) week paying for the promotional advertising budget out of the net gross profit margin (in this case, 20%) or maximum Cost Of Sale (COS) percentage.
For this campaign to be self-funded, for a $10,000/week media budget, sales needed to be $50,000 at a COS/margin of 20% = $10,000. That’s where the next obstacle presented itself. To make $50,000 in sales, using Facebook with its scattergun approach to lead generation, meant that we had to attract $250,000 of prospective travellers to close 20% or $50,000 of sales.The Average Order Value (AOV) of $2,500 with +/-2.5 people per travel group meant that the FCT had to talk to +-100 travel groups per week, which with two salespeople was just not humanly possible.
Once two additional salespeople were hired, the campaign reached its critical mass and the campaign went on to generate a whopping $4 million in sales with an AOV $1,000 higher than the voucher promotions with double the net bottom line profit.
If you would like to be the next successful case study, mastering RAW DATA with Exponential Marketing Strategies that create out-of-the-ordinary results like this, contact UEC by clicking here.
Read Also
Your Application is Mostly Written by Strangers
Edwin Kwan, Head of Application and Software Security at Tyro Payments
ESG Performance - Why It's Crucial To Future Success
Jo-Anne Ruhl, vice president and managing director, Workday Australia and New Zealand.
Enterprise Digital Transformation is not for the faint hearted: Guiding principles for a enterprise-wide digital transformation
Linda Zeelie, Enterprise Digital Transformation Architect and Leader, Metlife and Nina Evans (Professorial lead: UniSA STEM, University of South Australia (UniSA))
Digital Transformation/Modernisation, It is a Continuous Journey
Fahad Najeeb, Head of Data Platforms and Engineering, Latitude Financial Services
