CASE STUDY

ONE PLANET PIZZA

A Combination of eCommerce Emails and Digital Ads to Improve User Acquisition & Retention

BACKGROUND

One Planet Pizza is a vegan frozen pizza company. The brand has an existing network of independent retailers and has plans to move into big supermarket chains. Alongside this, the founders also wanted to introduce a D2C element to their strategy. The brand focuses on challenging the conventional frozen pizza market by providing a delicious, sustainable and plant-based option.

The business was primarily focussed on a go-to-market strategy that involved teaming up with independent health and vegan food stores. This gave them a direct line to their ideal customer base but didn’t allow for much scale. To achieve the desired levels of growth and profit margins, they identified the need to establish an online direct-to-consumer arm of the business. 

Any vegan product naturally has a niche audience, so trying to scale was always going to be difficult. Prior to this activity, One Plant Pizza hadn’t had much of an advertising presence and so, although a strong favourite amongst existing customers, there wasn’t much brand awareness outside of the customer base; and that’s without moving out of the vegan market.

As the business had primarily focused on new product development to date there wasn’t much of an eCommerce email system in place to help retain and upsell customers either.

Before an advertising funnel could be built I needed to deal with this problem to reduce obvious leakages in the funnel.

THE
     PROBLEM

THE
   OUTCOME

When I inherited the accounts, Digital Ads were contributing only 2% to the total monthly revenue. Through a restructuring and optimisation I grew this to an average of 27%.

Over £10k of revenue was driven by the new email marketing infrastructure, and a new and sustainable advertising campaign for the company was created to increase brand awareness amongst a new set of audiences.

I pivoted from the original project brief to handle the Covid-19 pandemic, using this to their advantage to bring a new and wider audience to the company. 

Throughout the pandemic, we navigated the company's marketing strategy and advertisements successfully.

INSIGHT
INTO THE EXECUTION

Initially, I built the technical infrastructure to allow for the deployment of a sophisticated eCommerce email solution; then I wrote all the email copy (e.g. abandoned carts and lapsed customers) and built out a testing flightplan so we could be sure we were moving our conversion rates in the right direction.

Once happy with the performance of the emails, I built out campaigns on Google Ads and Facebook Ads targeting strong vegan audiences and lookalikes of the existing customer base

Detailed weekly reporting gave us insight on what was working and what wasn’t, allowing us to tweak all parts of the strategy over the course of several months.

Covid-19 pandemic: Project brief change
 
The pandemic caused some huge shifts in societal behaviour, some obvious and some less so. We identified a trend of more people consuming vegan and plant-based food, and so our marketing and advertising campaign needed to adapt to this. I changed our strategy from targeting existing vegans and opened the audience up to non-vegans who were sympathetic to a plant-based option. However, as the pandemic length increased, we noticed the negative impact of low brand awareness and a general fatigue in this audience due to the influx of competition from other vegan brands.

So, the plan changed again.

We decided to re-route our campaigns into three separate ad campaigns: prospecting, re-engagement, and remarketing. This new campaign allowed us to give the company a new advertising strategy which was sustainable and manageable for their business while also increasing brand awareness, audience engagement and profits. 

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