How Sendcloud scrapped their worst performing campaigns to boost ROI
With growing attention on ROI, the team at Sendcloud found themselves needing a more transparent view of the buyer’s journey.
They needed to accurately link their efforts to pipeline and identify the channels and campaigns that were actually adding value, and, crucially, dropping the ones that weren’t.
With a diverse tech stack, this proved to be an important challenge. The team at Sendcloud trialled a number of setups, which turned out to be either too complex to set up or lacking enough detail to offer meaningful insights.
That’s why the team at Sendcloud turned to Dreamdata.
Key results Sendcloud has achieved with Dreamdata so far:
Boost ROI by using pipeline data to scrap their worst-performing channels.
Strike the balance between volume-focused and efficiency-focused campaigns.
Accurately measure the end-to-end length of the buyer journey.
About Sendcloud:
Sendcloud is an all-in-one shipping platform that accelerates international growth by helping online retailers save time on shipping, optimising their checkout, offering branded tracking and a seamless return process for both businesses and consumers.
Sendcloud believes that everyone should be able to scale internationally, which is why they’re on a mission to make shipping as easy as possible and turn it into a competitive advantage.
The challenge: getting real transparency of marketing’s impact on pipeline
Arkadiy Kondrashov’s job as Head of Performance Marketing at Sendcloud is to develop his team’s strategy and enable them to fulfil their objectives through tools and data. Above all else, this requires Arkadiy and his team to have access to realiable data on their activities’ impact on pipeline and revenue, which they can then operationalise by scaling and optimising campaigns.
However, faced with data silos across their go-to-market tech stack, the team lacked the knowledge and insights of the buyer’s journey they needed to make data-driven decisions.
With a growing focus on efficiencies, this lack of transparency was proving to be a significant stumbling block for Arkadiy.
The team at Sendcloud knew they needed a solution that would collect and model their customer journey data under one roof.
Initially, they tried working with Mixpanel to understand what was happening in the journey, but this was tracking mostly post-signup touches, leaving them none the wiser on the impact of their efforts in the early stages of the funnel. They subsequently trialled HubSpot’s MarketingHub but found the setup process didn’t align with their time expectations.
“We found that very difficult to implement because we also had to replace our landing pages, forms, etc. So basically it looked like a job for the next six months for the whole marketing team.” highlighted Arkadiy.
Instead, with growing urgency to meet their requirements for end-to-end customer journey tracking, they turned to Dreamdata.
The solution: an integrated tech stack that offers insights of the end-to-end buyer journey
“Dreamdata was super easy to implement because they are all native integrations with ad networks like Google, Facebook, even LinkedIn, which is not really up to share the data with external platforms, and G2.”
Dreamdata is a B2B revenue attribution platform that collects and transforms go-to-market data to provide companies with actionable analysis of what drives their revenue.
Arkadiy adds that “Dreamdata is also very easy to use and start with. Although the customisation is something that requires a certain focus and certain resources from the operational team. Right now we have prioritized this and we have a few people from the operations team that's helping us utilise this data.”
And with 950 million recorded touches sitting in their data warehouse, there’s a ton of potential.
With all the customisation now in place, the performance marketing team has been able to:
Gain a much better understanding of the real buyer's journey, its length, the number of stakeholders, touches, etc.
“Understand how different campaigns and sources and channels contribute to the business result or maybe just sales pipeline.”
Access enriched data that they now have in place in their own databases. Enabling them to have “more dashboards with better insights.”
Although still in the early stages of internal implementation, the team at Sendcloud has started enabling the Sales team with Dreamdata for re-engagement efforts and offering a better understanding of what customers/prospects are doing on the website.
The results: improve ROI by scrapping their worst-performing channels and campaigns
Since starting with Dreamdata Arkadiy and his team have been able to deliver a number of important results.
And the results speak for themselves.
Boost ROI by using pipeline data to scrap their worst-performing channels and campaigns.
With Dreamdata’s Performance dashboards, and a focus on SQL conversions, Arkadiy and his team have been able to confidently scrap the channels and campaigns that were simply not impacting pipeline. Channels and campaigns which, on the ad networks themselves, were showing great results.
The result? Better ROI.
“Many campaigns actually looked really, really nice on the ads accounts. Sometimes they were impressive from like CPA perspective and also volumes that were green in terms of signups.
But when we decided to go deeper in our analysis, so the funnel, we found out that they generated just a few SQLs. So basically the potential return on investment was just not acceptable.”
Arkadiy and his team divided campaigns into four buckets. Everything that fell in the lowest bucket was earmarked for scrapping.
“We scaled down Facebook Ads because we found out that ROI is not acceptable for our goals, we decided also to cut down Google ads campaigns, and we saved some money on G2 with the help of Dreamdata.”
Now Arkadiy and his team drive approx. 70% of all SQLs, and are running a healthier ROI.
Fine-tune the balance between volume and efficiency and justify spend on branded campaigngs
While identifying efficiencies has been the headline use case, identifying growth drivers has also been a core function of using Dreamdata. The performance team at Sendcloud have been able to continually fine-tune the balance between volume and efficiency, ensuring they can not only maintain their 70% share of SQL gen, but grow it.
“With an understanding of business goals in terms of like how much revenue we need to bring, we can adjust and calculate back to our campaigns, how many leads we’re bringing that will be converted. And you also understand like the difference between all of these campaigns. With no proper attribution. This was not possible.”
A key component here has been the performance of branded campaigns.
Arkadiy tells us, “sometimes we need to justify expenses for the branded campaigns which also contribute more down the final stages. And it's also very important to show results with different attribution models.”
“We now have a holistic view of how different types of campaigns, different sources contribute to different stages. And we work to kind of find the balance between efficiency and volume. Because we also still need to help the company’s growth focus.” he added.
Track and measure the end-to-end buyer journey
At a higher level of analysis, Dreamdata has been similarly groundbreaking for the team at Sendcloud.
Their tracking setup prior to starting with Dreamdata, offered a limited view of the buyer journey
Arkadiy tells us that they were previously working on the assumption that the buyer journey “took something like three weeks more or less.”
“But with Dreamdata, we found that for some segments from the first touch to sign up it takes, maybe three or four months. So basically the discovery phase like or educational phase before they actually convert, they spent loads and loads of days actually going to blogs, reading our integration pages, pricing pages, etc.”
“And yeah, this part was actually not visible for us is like a bottom part of the iceberg. We just knew it was there, but we never knew how long it was.”
This has helped the team not only better manage their planning, but identify the whole range of touches which impact the buying journey - including some surprises.
For instance, the success of their pricing page chatbot. Which despite being minimal effort, was generating revenue.
“Yeah, that's also very funny, um, that we just had a chatbot on our pricing page that we've never invested in money basically and bring in lots of revenue in the journey.”
Despite these results, Arkadiy reminds us that these are still early days.
“But we're still on our way to even more improvements as we’re just now starting to split our focus into different segments, etc.”
So stay tuned for our update in the not-too-distant future!
