Over the last 10 years, South Africans have experienced rolling power outages. To make matters worse, warnings for these outages are typically announced on the day they are scheduled to take place. The knock-on effect? A flurry of searches for alternative power.
Bundu Power happens to be a supplier of alternative energy solutions. But the company found that although the number of people searching for its products was at an all-time high, potential customers were passing them by.
Investigate: Shine a light on the problem
After some analysis, the team discovered a few issues. Firstly, their ads account hadn’t been actively monitored for long periods, and campaigns were set to manual bidding with no bid adjustments. They also found that leaving the responsibility of scaling marketing efforts for an entire customer base to one person wasn't going to cut it. Most importantly, they had forgotten they were talking to people, each with different needs from the other.
These missteps meant all of the company’s search ad campaigns had less than a 10% search-impression share. Plus, their budget ran out at vital times of the day, just when searches for alternative power supply companies were trending.
Strategise: Manage bids without the heavy lifting
A necessary switch to automated campaigns meant the team could safely leave machine learning to adjust bids for them, cutting out some of the heavy lifting and time investment.
In a few days, new leads started to come in. Month-by-month conversions increased by 170% at a decreased Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) of 28%, and the overall conversion rate increased by 13%.
“The constant tweaking required to take advantage and leverage spend needed regular maintenance and optimisation,” says Nick von Broembsen, managing director of Bundu Power. “Automation not only helped us realise a 170% increase in conversions, it freed me up to do what I’m actually employed to do, and that’s grow the business.”
Most importantly, their search-impression share increased by 330%.
Maximise: What do you do with an unexpected increase in business?
With an increase in leads came the need to manage them. Bundu Power considered either deploying more staff, and updating its process, among other options. They ultimately landed on automated personalisation.
It was important that it was set up in a way that would not seem spammy or disingenuous to its customers. Personalisation is human. Who wants a blanket email when you’ve had to put up with a blanket blackout?
Through the use of logic conditions (to filter repetitive emails to customers who had received several quotations from Bundu Power) and the use of personalisation, the team was able to achieve the kind of conversion rate they were after.
Maintain: Predicting the unpredictable
The journey to this realisation shows how important it is to take the time to identify campaign gaps, and tap into customer insights to make marketing campaigns more effective. Their major learning? You can’t predict when your clients will need you, but you can make sure you’re there when they do.
