How Youfoodz delivered marketing campaign ROI of nearly 2200 per cent

The meal delivery market has undergone something of a boom in recent years, with a plethora of options emerging that offer everything from home-delivered fine dining through to pre-prepared fresh meals and packaged raw produce you prepare yourself.

For ready-to-eat meal delivery service, Youfoodz, strong growth through 2014 and 2015 had been achieved through use of traditional mediums such as radio and TV. But according to general manager, Kane Sala, the company was not utilising its digital channels to their full potential. Hence it turned to customer acquisition specialist, Alley Group, who employed an end-to-end customer lifecycle strategy, leveraging existing customer data and harvesting data from second and third-party sources, to turbocharge its strategy.

Sala says Alley had been recommended by another business that had seen its work and was impressed by its strategy and execution.

“We really valued their attitude, as Youfoodz goes against the grain with our strategy and continues to set ‘unrealistic’ targets,” Sala says. “Alley turned up and said: ‘We’ll hit those targets – and more’. After a very impressive presentation, we couldn’t say no.”

The first step was to introduce Youfoodz to Alley’s fully-managed digital marketing platforms, handling everything from social through to display, with data harvested across channels to create look-a-like algorithms targeting customers that had the best chance of converting.

Sala says Alley also helped with redefining Youfoodz’s creative strategy, using non-stop testing to determine which elements gave the highest return.

“This means constantly fine-tuning our digital assets and messaging, knowing with certainty what copy and creative is most likely to convert,” Sala says. “This has been essential to our creative and marketing team, as we take these learnings and apply them offline too.

“We immediately saw results in marketing through our own analytics, but when Alley began working with our creative team on social campaigns, we had assets perform better than they had ever seen before. Some campaign ROI was in excess of 2200 per cent.”

The criticality of customer data

Alley Group’s CEO Nick Lavidge, says his firm’s dedication to collecting data and tracking behaviour is critical, as it enables clients to make smarter media buys.

“Depending on systems in place across all their channels, we build custom attribution models with our clients to track if prospects that are served ads turn into customers,” he explains. “It pushes everyone to be more accountable for every cent spent.”

Lavidge says it is common to see companies not leveraging the extent of their data to gain a better understanding of who their customers really are and how they like to be communicated with.

“Often, marketers only think about their customers in relationship to their product, but there’s a lot more to consider with the customer beyond their affinity with your offering,” he says.

For example, it is often assumed the (Youfoodz) customer is a fitness-focused individual. However, by employing insights from customer data, Alley Group determined that interest in real estate was actually a stronger category.

“That example proves it’s important for marketers to realise consumers have several attributes that have nothing to do with the product,” Lavidge says.

As a result of the partnership, Youfoodz has scaled back spending on media that was providing low ROI or where success was harder to track, such as print and letterbox drops.

To date, the engagement with Alley Group has delivered Youfoodz more than 70,000 new customers and a 139 per cent increase in returning customers, leading to a 223 per cent increase on average weekly revenue.

“We’re now on top of every cent, ensuring marketing is providing the return necessary to grow our business at the rate we’re aiming for,” Sala says. “We’ve developed a strong system for testing, learning, and scaling that continues to produce great results in a very competitive market.

“We’ve scaled our budget over 100 times in the past 24 months, trusting Alley to show us where our ROI is and to be accountable for those decisions.”

With Facebook recently announcing 71 per cent growth in its profit to US$3.89 billion, Sala describes the social media platform as a ‘trifecta for marketing’.

“Overall, Facebook has been one of our biggest drivers of success,” he says. “It’s a great platform to build brand awareness, encourage engagement, and drive sales.

“There are so many different ad units our teams can test and have a bit of fun with. With the data from Alley, we know creative execution can skew performance, so we’re always optimising our creative for every campaign.”

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