Not everyone’s in the market for a trampoline.
And with the rising cost of customer acquisition, it’s vital to get the jump on consumers who are serious about making what’s both a niche and pricey purchase.
For that, you need unified data across channels, said Saugar Sainju, VP of growth marketing at Goba Sports Group, a sporting goods company that distributes Teva, Umbro, shoe brand Sanuk and trampoline brand Springfree, among others.
“The way we think about data is becoming more and more profile-based, and we need to be able to activate that data to different channels,” said Sainju, who started working with customer data platform BlueConic in 2018 as part of a larger cross-channel data unification effort.
For Springfree, that means connecting anonymous web traffic with its direct response ads and any future lead gen. “If we can get that traffic to sign up, we’re able to convert an anonymous profile to an identified profile while still retaining some historical data,” Sainju said.
Springfree started using its CDP last year to target people who had already visited its site with different messaging across channels based on their engagement and consumption. The messaging focused on safety and product quality, which Springfree surmised were two of the most important factors in driving a trampoline purchase.
Having data from across its mar tech stack in one place made it possible to activate its messaging in a more organized way.
Springfree could drive traffic to its site through ads featuring a safety message, for example, identify visitors against their profiles, connect those to the type of content they consumed, and then send a follow-up message using an email automation system.
“We weren’t able to do this before, to take information from one channel and use it to inform the messaging we push out in another,” Sainju said.
This year, Springfree got a little more nuanced with its content strategy. Rather than only hitting visitors with messaging related to safety and quality, the brand started retargeting people based on the content they actually engage with when they visit the site. Turns out that people were more likely to engage with lifestyle content – stuff like “DIY Backyard Fun: 15 Ways To Turn Your Backyard Into A Kid Fun Zone” – than with product information.
“Our bounce rates immediately dropped and our CTR went up, and we started getting a more engaged audience that we could retain longer on the site, nurture and convert,” Sainju said. “We were able to do this because of our ability to track behavior through the CDP.”
But the biggest positive impacts were on Springfree’s cost per acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS). The CPA decreased by 24% in the United States, while ROAS rose by 59% in Q2. In Canada, the CPA declined by 13%, and ROAS increased by 55% during the same time frame.
“When your ROAS goes up and your CPA goes down it means your marketing is effective on a macro level,” Sainju said.
When Sainju first started digging into the CDP space a few years ago, it was a bewildering experience. The category was, and is, crowded by companies that all call themselves a CDP but seem to focus on different uses for customer data.
“You have one group of vendors talking about journey analytics, another talking about machine learning, another talking about consuming data and spitting out trends,” Sainju said. “It got a little confusing.”
But Sainju was able to parse the difference between vendors by changing his own mindset. Rather than trying to understand all of the different tools available, Sainju started thinking about the problem he and his team wanted to solve.
“Once I started thinking about the goal and looking at the CDP as a way for us to achieve it – a profile-based aggregation tool that we can use to connect offline CRM data with all of our online activity – this space got a lot less complex to navigate,” he said.
