*FTU – first-time user who pays for the service
As a natural outcome of the quarantine, this food delivery business experienced an increasing demand for their services. When this happened, we immediately knew it’s a chance to scale our Facebook Ads and Google Ads App campaigns. We considered this as a “one in a lifetime” opportunity to receive more app downloads from people who would not only convert into first-time users faster but keep ordering more within upcoming weeks, consequently increasing the LTV (Customer Lifetime Value).
At the end of 2019, an international food delivery company reached out to us to help them keep the service on the Polish market with further plans of expanding it there.
The main challenge was to decrease the CAC (CPFTU – cost per first-time user) as its high rate prevented the business from maintaining profitability. The company did not apply a working digital sales funnel strategy and it was our suggestion to implement it as the first step of our cooperation.
We produced and promoted storytelling video-content, which allowed us to remarket video viewers and people who clicked on ads with various creatives including product animations, testimonials, banners featuring food images and restaurant seasonal and special promotions.
Due to the March outbreak of the COVID-19 virus people had to stay at home, which, in a natural way, contributed to more online orders of food delivery.
The situation made us quickly reevaluate our strategy. We decided to scale media budgets and simplify the funnel. With such a strategy applied, we managed to lower the CPFTU by 76%.
As a result, our monthly KPIs were overachieved, so we have continued our actions with estimations to improve these results further for at least 100% in April.
Breaking the learning phase makes the results unstable and doesn’t let Facebook algorithm understand which users should see the ads to convert efficiently. To not interfere with Facebook ads learning phase, we were scaling the campaigns’ budgets by 10-15% a day and uploading new ads in bulk, as launching new ads breaks the learning.
Our main focus was given to the cost per FTU metric which is mostly attributed to the low cost per install that we managed to achieve. Naturally, when increasing the number of app installs, FTU rate drops (FTU rate = FTUs/Installs). Although, from a business-wide perspective, lower cost per FTU is what makes campaigns profitable.
One of the ways that differentiates our client from other competitors on the market is by giving the audience a possibility to take a quiz that can help them choose the food they would like to order. The quiz, which CTA leads to app download action, allowed us to warm up and cheaply convert cold audiences into paying users with a single touch point.
As we scale during this crisis, it becomes even more important to test as many ad variations as we possibly can to convert our audience in the most cost-efficient way. We used our advanced testing frameworks to keep on track with dozens of creatives and copies that were tested simultaneously.
Easy to scale, all types of placements, algorithm learning and self-optimization available. With proper bidding and creatives adjustments it’s an easy win.
If you want to double the amount of clients, you will definitely need to target a broader audience (even if your targeting already seems broad to you).
All the efforts we previously put into brand awareness activities and warming up of our target audience can be now fully rewarded. Brand awareness (previously created by video content distribution) helps us now convert a greater number of people without spending budgets and resources on new content production and promotion.
Users who installed the app before the crisis but didn’t order any food are now cheaply converted into paying customers.
As previous crises have shown, this specific time might mean losing on opportunities because of cutting marketing budgets.
However, for some visionary businesses, this is also a chance for new product launches, rapid revenue growth and improving brand position on the market by simply helping people adjust to this new reality.
This food delivery business is a great example of fast adjustment and bold decisions which resulted in amazing revenue growth. Not only we doubled the number of first-time paying customers, but we also observed the rapid growth of previously acquired user cohorts.
For the time being, we are ready to scale further, but if the situation changes, we will be ready to adjust and use different marketing channels to retain and boost the loyalty of newly acquired customers.
Number of FTUs
Cost per FTU
Cost per Install
Ready to expand your reach? Briefly tell us about your business and we’ll schedule a 1-hour meeting to show you how we can integrate our digital marketing approach into your business.
