ECOMMERCE
Lowering Acquisition Cost
25%
Reduction in customer acquisition cost
40%
Reduction in total cross-channel costs
751%
Increase in conversions from Facebook activities
RedBalloon Adopts AI and Reduces Overall Cost by Upward of 40%
“What we’re finding is that he’s (Albert’s) able to work from the top of the funnel to the bottom and join those dots, which has allowed us to achieve unbelievable ROAS. We don’t know where the ceiling is, and we can’t wait to see how Albert can continue to accelerate and amplify our efforts.”
Naomi Simson | Co-Founder of Big Red Group
About
RedBalloon.com.au is Australia’s most awarded online experience retailer. A trusted leader in the online retail space since 2001, RedBalloon pioneered experiential gifting in Australia. The brand connects customers with more than 4,000 unique and amazing experiences, sourced from more than 2,000 business owners, and has delivered more than four million customers to these businesses across Australia and New Zealand.
Challenges
RedBalloon had massive brand awareness, but ever-reducing consideration, and the cost of customer acquisition was becoming prohibitive. Whereas in previous years the cost of acquisition had peaked at 5 cents, costs were now as high as $50 per new acquisition. The team was eager to find a tech solution that could make better investment decisions autonomously and more efficiently. In addition, RedBalloon was finding it difficult to connect their brand emotionally with the audience. They were getting lost in attribution, pulling the SEM lever over and over again, talking to the same audiences, and creating the same campaigns with diminishing returns. Albert has helped figure out the answer by opening the brand up to new and previously unexplored audiences.
Solutions
Traditionally, marketers look at attribution models of the past and think this predicts the future. But Albert retests everyday to try and disprove the old model, and find a different way. That’s what he did for RedBalloon, and many of the ideas they had about their audiences and the effectiveness of their campaigns were fundamentally disproved on day one. After processing RedBalloon’s customer interactions and transaction history, Albert was quickly able to unlock hidden insights about what messaging worked for the brand and what didn’t. Using large, rapid scale, multivariate testing, Albert confirmed and expanded upon the system's initial learnings and insights, all while autonomously analyzing and revising actions based on changing customer behaviors and patterns.
• Albert identified and executed over 6,400 keywords to improve performance across the RedBalloon business in 24 hours alone.
• Previously RedBalloon was only talking to 1% of their reachable base on social; they’re now working the upper funnel with Albert to increase consideration with the other 99%
• Albert doesn’t just focus on the bottom end of the funnel (conversion), but leverages RedBalloon content for brand awareness and consideration to fill the top and middle funnel as well.
Results
Once they had achieved their initial goal of reducing acquisition costs, Albert and the RedBalloon marketing team successfully adapted the company’s product feed into an online catalog. The catalog allowed for new shopper campaigns across channels and delivered an additional 3434% ROAS specifically for Facebook. Albert was able to drive down the total cost of acquisition across channels for RedBalloon by 25% in less than one month, relieving the team of many of the manual and process-driven tasks.