Customer engagement transformation, driven by data-powered automation

Quick Results

About the Client

KBF Enterprises Ltd are one of the UK’s largest sports nutrition companies. KBF currently incorporates seven popular B2C brands, including Bodybuilding Warehouse (BBW), an industry-leading supplements brand. Founded back in 2008 in Manchester, they pride themselves on offering friendly customer service, quality ingredients, and great value pricing.

Bodybuilding Warehouse manufactures their extensive range in-house, in their GMP-certified, state-of-the-art facility. Regularly producing innovative product releases, this leading eCommerce company pass their factory-direct savings onto their customers.

Business Challenge

As KBF Enterprises grew, the company needed more time to focus on developing new product innovations and delivering premium customer service.

They partnered with CTI to provide full digital marketing services for their flagship website: Bodybuilding Warehouse. Online Advertising and SEO improvements have an important part to play but, in a crowded marketplace reliant on discount codes, email marketing is one of the eCommerce site's biggest sales drivers.  

While their previous email marketing efforts brought in some sales, conversion rates were below 0.5% of a five-figure mailing list. They were sending out emails every single day with limited return. To facilitate continued growth, KBF Enterprises needed a new email marketing platform, to improve customer engagement and to offer a better return on investment.

Key requirements:

  • Increase average order value or frequency spend

  • Segment sending list

  • Define targeted and informed discount offers

  • Optimise sending time and rate

  • Design impactful, responsive email templates

Software Migration: Bronto Email Marketing

The previous email marketing for bodybuildingwarehouse.co.uk relied on a bloated address book, which marketers would struggle to segment effectively. To streamline the email marketing process, we migrated the service to Oracle Bronto, a data-driven email automation software. Changing software immediately reduced cost of ownership, saving money for KBF Enterprises to invest in producing better emails.

Working with the Magento development team to integrate the new marketing software, Bronto, into the eCommerce site, we defined all key data for migration. The new system sifted out extraneous details, whilst retaining contact details and customer histories. During this process we cleansed the database and re-assigned contact lists, to ensure more accurate, valuable data.

 

Automating the Customer Journey

Bronto’s powerful automation features allowed us to direct the customer journey efficiently. Taking advantage of date-based automation, email notifications play an important role in BBW’s marketing. Introducing ‘Welcome to Brand’ and ‘Re-stock Reminder’ campaigns, we have been able to deliver relevant offers, when and where customers want them.

Impactful Email Design/Email UX

Whilst the existing emails from Bodybuilding Warehouse embodied their enthusiastic tone, they often missed out on consistent design and ease of understanding.

With the average read time of an email at just 11.1 seconds, it’s vital to get the message across quickly. Therefore we re-imagined the hectic style into sleek, impactful emails that make understanding the offer at hand easy and enticing.

Impactful Email Design

Structured Online Advertising

To advertise Bodybuilding Warehouse and its associated brands online, we focused on paid ads on Google Ads, Bing and Facebook/Instagram.

To simplify management, we restructured the KBF Enterprises' Google Ads account. We split campaigns into Search Ads, Display/Remarketing Ads, DSA and Shopping Ads.

We then further segmented search campaigns into different categories:

  • Bodybuilding Warehouse Brand

  • Own-Brand Products

  • Other Brand (Third-party) Products

  • Generics

This structure has allowed us to monitor ROI for their own-brand and 3rd-party products, which have much lower margins.

Using Google Shopping ads, we split own and third-party brands into separate campaigns, to push own-brand products. We also wanted to target users based on intention, so we created Shopping campaigns for Brand, Own Brands, 3rd-Party Brands and Generics.

This setup has allowed us to push for visibility on high-margin products, when searches include the BBW brand or other KBF Enterprises Own Brand products. Structuring the campaigns also allows us to protect the budget, pulling back on promoting 3rd-Party Brands if they don’t hit the ROAS target.

Once we had strong structure in place, we imported these campaigns into Bing, so we could replicate the structure easily and create a new revenue stream. Whilst Traffic and Revenue levels have been smaller, ROIs have been better on this channel.

Audience-Targeted Advertising

For Display/Remarketing we created audiences of Website Visitors, Converters or Visitors of Specific Categories, to target with image ads, showing offers and new product launches. We also created In-Market audiences, targeting people who have purchased gym classes or equipment.

These audiences were also used in the Search campaigns, with increased bids for users in these audience groups.

We also set up a Dynamic Remarketing campaign through a feed, serving dynamic ads with the specific products users had been looking at on the website.

Finally, we targeted users on social media, creating a Remarketing campaign on Facebook, targeting Visitors to the website and Converters. We also created separate Prospecting campaigns for Facebook and Instagram, targeting bodybuilders, gym goers, users interested in protein products and other relevant categories, Next steps will include creating sales funnels, so we can follow purchasers’ trajectory and target them with relevant adverts to help push them along the funnel.

Quality Assurance (QA) Testing

All of our projects undergo rigorous testing, throughout the software development process. In order to deliver the utmost quality for clients and their respective users, our in-house QA team ensure that all end products perform accurately and reliably under normal and abnormal conditions. Testing is followed by continual monitoring of software performance, to prevent reoccurrence of any issues and to ensure efficient ongoing operation.

As such, we were able to confidently deliver a well-designed, scalable and technically stable result.

Results

Since taking on marketing responsibility for Bodybuilding Warehouse we have fostered a collaborative relationship with the internal team at KBF Enterprises. We provide ongoing digital marketing and web development for the local independent company.

By reducing the quantity of emails sent from Bodybuilding Warehouse and segmenting the lists we send to, open rates have increased dramatically. Automated campaigns previously saw open rates as low as 3.5%, where now each automated email averages 73% open rate.

Specifically, correct timing and segmentation has seen automated re-stocking campaigns rise from 0.8% to 20% conversion rate. Meanwhile, the introduction of an abandoned basket email has also boosted 13.38% conversions from lapsed customers.

The next steps will be to implement a Recency, Frequency, Monetary Value (RFM) strategy. Using smarter automation and data to segment individuals, customers will remain engaged throughout their entire purchasing lifecycle.

As our company and fan-base continues to grow, I am excited to see how CTI’s expertise will help to further our success. Our focus is on delivering a personal touch, so I am glad to have chosen a team who we have worked with before [for web development] and who reflect the BBW values.

Kieran Fisher, Founder and Managing Director of KBF Enterprises