Mailchimp on Adbeat

How Groupon is using most of their $65.8M ad spend on video ads to successfully increase conversions.

Wed, 17 Jul 2019 15:52:24 +0000

Chicago-based Groupon was launched in 2008, and offers an eCommerce marketplace for people looking to purchase vouchers and coupons for a diverse range of local activities, goods, and services. Whether you fancy a cruise vacation, a romantic dinner or a manicure, you can simply use the platform to discover the best deals, discounts, and offers available around you. With 48.2 million active customers, the company currently operates in 15 countries and generated a revenue of US$2.84 billion in 2017. In 2011, Groupon created an online app (195 million downloads) that leverages a user’s geolocation to find the best deals in entertainment, travel, home improvement, beauty, food, and other personalized activities. By March 2018, 72 percent of all their sales were taking place through a mobile device. 2018: Tiffany Haddish Superbowl campaign In an interview with Jimmy Kimmel (2018), Tiffany Haddish shared an anecdote about using Groupon to book a swamp tour for herself, and her co-star Jada Pinkett Smith. After the segment went viral, the company signed the actress for a Super Bowl commercial depicting Haddish as a savvy shopper who supports local businesses and saves money by using Groupon. Within 8 days, the ad amassed 7 million views on Youtube, helping Groupon build a stronger brand presence, and increasing sales momentum.

At the same time, the company worked with SocialCode, the marketing agency that spearheaded successful social media campaigns for brands like Toscano, VISA, and Michael Kors, to run video ads across Facebook and Instagram. Groupon also used Google to run similar paid search campaigns across the web built around long-tail keywords. With Haddish, Groupon tried to undo the PR disaster caused by their 2011 Super Bowl commercial starring A-list celebrities like Cuba Gooding Jr., Elizabeth Hurley, and Timothy Hutton. While each ad began with the premise of supporting a noteworthy cause (wildlife conservation, saving the rainforests, the Tibetian crisis), the pitch quickly and abruptly moves away from their initial message to plug Groupon. For example, Hutton starts off his commercial by announcing, “The people of Tibet are in trouble. Their very culture is in jeopardy,” before saying, “…but they still whip up an amazing fish curry and since 200 of us bought at Groupon.com, we’re each getting $30 worth of Tibetan food for just $15 at Himalayan Restaurant in Chicago.”

The commercial (that Groupon reportedly invested $3 million in) sparked an immediate controversy post-airing, with a vast majority of people agreeing that it “missed the mark” and was ‘distasteful’. Eventually, the company axed the entire campaign and shifted their advertising strategy to focus only on display and search ads, instead of TV. That’s before the Haddish opportunity fell into their lap. 2019: Brand makeover + Reformed approach to advertising According to Craig Rowley, Groupon’s new CMO, the company is preparing for a big change in 2019, where they’re “moving away from the vouchers of the past” and “building a true global marketplace with new partners and a broader selection of local services and experiences”. By partnering with nationally renowned brands like Costco, AMC theatres, Sam’s Club, TripAdvisor, and Pandora, alongside the local mom-and-pop stores, Groupon is all set to mature into a platform where users can buy tickets, order food, discover branded experiences and earn rewards on repeat purchases. Rowley further clarifies that the company will be revising their media spend, and will be investing more on YouTube and cinema advertising this year. He also believes that they haven’t been as aggressive with social media marketing as they should be—something that they plan on fixing in the near future. “A lot of the marketing and the idea behind how the brand is going to be served up, it’s going to shift to incorporate more of those things and really play out the idea that we are a true local marketplace,” he said. Let’s take an in-depth look into what Groupon’s ad spend, top publishers, creatives, and landing pages actually look(s) like. Ad Spend and Ad Networks In the last 6 months, Groupon has spent a whopping $65.8M on online advertising, with the majority going towards Direct Buy ($63.4M), where the company negotiates with a publisher (for example, ESPN or CNN) to purchase advertising space. Apart from the pricing, an advertiser can decide the ad placement, copy, and even the exact duration the ad will run for. As opposed to programmatic ad-buying where you have the option of contextual targeting, direct ad-buying relies entirely on getting traction from the publisher’s audience. This explains why successful direct ad-buying is all about choosing relevant publishers that have the kind of audience you’re trying to attract. For example, Mailchimp, the marketing automation platform that also invests predominantly in direct ad-buying, advertises mostly with technology-forward publishers—and their ads appear on pages related to the latest smart home devices, upcoming innovations, and workplace productivity hacks. Groupon also has a hefty budget dedicated to YouTube ($2M), and Google Search Partners ($249.3K), with very little money going towards Google Native ($1.4K), Taboola ($611) and Outbrain. This explains why 97 percent of their ads are video, and almost none are native. On the contrary, while RetailMeNot, Priceline, and Ebates, direct competitors to Groupon, also invest heavily in direct ad-buying ($10.3M, $9.2M, and $3.9M respectively), video ads are not an integral part of their advertising strategy. Another thing that sets Groupon apart is that the company consistently advertises on both mobile and desktop, whereas, the others have been partial to mobile. Publishers Groupon’s top three publishers have remained the same for the past year —Youtube ($64M), Yahoo ($150K), and Target ($87.9K). In the last 6 months, they’ve moved away from Imgur and Best Buy and currently advertise with Coolmath Games ($85.3K) and Addicting Games ($76.3) instead.On Youtube, their ads appear on videos that are either trending or belong to channels that have a large subscriber base. For example, they spent $3M advertising on this video with 714,699,284 views on a channel that reviews kids’ toys. While the video and the channel are not directly relevant to Groupon as a brand, the channel’s 31M subscribers guarantee that the video will be watched by a substantial number of people—including the ones who might be interested in what Groupon has to offer. Similarly, another video that Groupon spent 1.8M on has been viewed 107,237,427 times and is posted by a channel with 633K subscribers. On the other hand, most of their ads on Yahoo are featured on the eCommerce section of the website—and specifically on pages selling mp3 players which probably get substantial traction. Overall, it’s safe to conclude that Groupon prefers advertising with publishers that are raking in a significant number of visitors every month, so their campaigns are seen by as many people as possible. They’re not putting much effort towards reaching the right people by using advanced targeting parameters like a lot of brands—and that seems to be working out for them at the moment. Creatives As we discussed earlier, 97 percent of Groupon’s ads are video, whereas, the remaining 3 percent are a combination of text, image, text/image or HTML5 type ads. In the last 6 months, the company has run :06, :15, and :30 second-long video ads featuring Haddish, where their primary focus has been remarketing to customers who’ve visited their platform but not made a purchase, and reaching out to past customers who have not returned to the platform in a long time. They’ve also used Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences tool to find potential customers who share the same characteristics as their existing customer base.

The Battle of Email Marketing Services: How Mailchimp and Sengrid run their paid advertising campaigns.

Fri, 03 May 2019 17:05:26 +0000

With the advent of virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and chatbots in recent years, email might seem like an outdated medium for marketing. However, nearly three-quarters of businesses everywhere continue to invest email marketing to increase engagement (22%) and retain their existing customers (29%). Out of the several email marketing services available in the marketing, Mailchimp, and Sendgrid stand out as the most popular choices for managing contacts and segmenting users to creating highly engaging emails and tracking campaign performance.Today, we’re going to compare the two services in terms of their ad spend, landing pages, creatives and publishers to get a comprehensive understanding of they run their paid advertising campaigns. Mailchimp Launched in 2001,Mailchimp was designed for small businesses looking to scale as an alternative to the high-end, oversized, and expensive tools and resources. While the founders—Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius—started the company as an email marketing solution, they eventually expanded to offer other services including Google ads, landing pages, signup forms, and more. In 2016, the platform was clocking in annual revenue of $400,000,000 with just 550 employees and increased their user base from 12 million to 16 million. Despite their extraordinary growth, MailChimp’s success didn’t wasn’t an overnight affair. They’ve spent years experimenting and testing to create a practical, loveable, result-oriented product that caters to the millions of people across the globe.Let’s take an in-depth look at how paid advertising has contributed to their progress: Ad Spend and Ad Networks In the last 6 months, Mailchimp has spent almost $1.2 M on ads, with $1.1M going towards Display ads alone. Most businesses—big or small—like to kick off the new year by investing in new technologies and tools, which explains the sudden increase in the ad spend for Jan'19 ($644.3K). Additionally, a considerable amount of their ad spend is also allocated to Google ($85.7K) and YouTube ($52.1K). There’s little to no money going towards Native or Programmatic advertising, which confirms Mailchimp’s preference for direct buying as opposed to real-time bidding. What does that mean, you ask? Well, in layman terms, Mailchimp buys ad impressions in bulk from specific publishers instead of auctioning each impression off to the highest bidder. Publishers Adopting a more contextual targeting strategy, Mailchimp mostly advertises on platforms that primarily cover technology-related news. For example, their top 5 publishers include Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Fast Company, The A.V. Club and New York Magazine. As a result, their ads can usually be seen next to articles talking about the latest smart home devices, upcoming innovations, and workplace productivity hacks. They’re also moving away from publishers like mmafighting.com, thesaurus.com, dictionary.com, The Weather Network, ESPN, Rotten Tomatoes, and more, as they are not likely to generate relevant traffic for Mailchimp. Unlike their competitor, Mailchimp only started advertising proactively in 2018, which explains why they still appear to be experimenting with a mixed bunch of publishers. While they seem to have found a strong footing with their current publishers, in addition to other well-known platforms such as Vox, The Verge, Jezebel, Deadspin, and Vice, it would be interesting to see how they budget their ad spend in the coming months. In the last 30 days, they’ve pitched in a significant amount of money on publishers they’ve discovered very recently— Gizmodo($153K), Lifehacker ($139.9K), and The A.V. Club ($74.9K). In the long-term, they probably benefit more from not putting all their eggs in one basket and strategically investing in new as well as old publishers that have worked well for them in the past. Creatives In August 2018, Mailchimp announced a complete rebrand and introduced a variety of marketing automation features for small businesses looking to sustainably scale up. Therefore, most of their recent ad creatives, including images, GIFs and videos, focus on establishing Mailchimp’s USP as ‘more than just email’. The copy is conversational and to the point, so that an average customer can easily gauge what services Mailchimp offers. Their videos use childlike illustrations that are purposefully off-kilter to showcase the various optimization tools that Mailchimp has to offer.

The yellow paired with black, albeit a very non-web platform choice, remains consistent across all their branding collateral which is important for building recognition. Earlier, Mailchimp’s did not have a distinctive colour scheme—in fact, most of their ads last year incorporated different colours as shown below—making it difficult to ensure brand recall.All their ads urge the viewer to ’learn more’ by clicking on the prominently displayed call-to-action (CTA) button. As Michael Aagaard accurately points out on Unbounce—CTAs “represent the tipping point between bounce and conversion”. While visual cues like shapes and colours are important for attracting a potential customer’s attention, ultimately, a CTA is what drives them to take action by creating a sense of urgency. Landing Pages For most of their campaigns, Mailchimp directs all traffic to their homepage where the headline + sub-headline is less about them and more about how they can help a potential customer’s business. Using the correct pronouns can have a lasting impact on how responsive customers are towards your marketing messages. It’s crucial that your landing page copy “ speaks to your target audience and not at them.”While writing copy for your marketing campaign, pay attention to the number of times you include the words ‘you’ vs. ‘we’. Mailchimp hits the nail on the head by using second person pronouns in almost 80% of their copy and dedicating only 20% to the first person pronouns. By focusing on the customer and their business, they’re able to personalize the landing page and the product they’re selling. In addition to compelling, customer-centric copy, Mailchimp’s homepage also includes a personalized CTA button (that convert 42% more visitors) that encourages people to sign up for free. Whether you want the users to subscribe to your newsletter, visit your blog, or download an e-book—a CTA is important for guiding them to the next stage of your sales funnel. Sendgrid Founded by Isaac Saladana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009, Sendgrid to simplify email delivery for businesses, primarily focussing on shipping notifications, newsletter, friend requests, and sign-up confirmations. Since then, the company has evolved to provide ISP monitoring, feedback loops, push notifications, SMS, domain keys, and sender policy framework (SPF).In 2017, Sendgrid generated $111.9 million in revenue (a 40% increase from the previous year), with $15 million coming from marketing campaigns alone. Additionally, the company announced that they were processing 36 billion emails per month. In 2018, they were acquired by Twilio, a California based cloud communications platform.Here’s a closer look into their advertising strategy: Ad Spend and Ad Networks Sengrid has spent a modest $929.2K on ad campaigns in the last 6 months, with the majority being dedicated to Google ($813.9K) and only $22.7K going towards Display ads. Unlike Mailchimp, Sendgrid has remained pretty consistent with their advertising during this time—with the exception of a notable spike starting 2019. One can assume that ads on the desktop have yielded better results for them as opposed to mobile, which explains why they continue to invest more money into the former than the latter.Sendgrid is one of the many businesses actively using programmatic technologies for advertising—a trend that’s expected to influence 65% of digital media this year. Programmatic ad-buying account for a whopping 89% of their ad spend. Publishers Taking a slightly unconventional approach, Sendgrid’s mostly advertisers on platforms that are not directly related to their product domain or brand values. For example, one of their top 5 publishers includes getitfree.us a website that collates the latest offers and deals. Similarly, MarketWatch and Kiplinger are about personal finance and business forecasting; Dogster is a magazine about—well, dogs; and Reddit is a user-driven community that covers pretty every topic under the sun. In the past year, they’ve experimented with several other publishers including Social Blade, wikiHow, Nicki Swift, Racked and Deviantart—some of which they continue to advertise with. However, they’re strategic with the spending and don’t seem to be putting a significant amount of their money on new—or any advertisers. In fact, contrary to Mailchimp that has spent $254.6K in the last 365 days on their current top publisher (Gizmodo), getitfree.us—Sendgrid’s current and overall top publisher made only $41.8K. Creatives In the last 6 months, Sendgrid has invested in a diverse set of ad campaigns. For example, the following campaigns focus on improving deliverability and dynamic email templates—both of which are key USPs or selling points of the product. They often leverage seasonal events like the holidays or their Twilio acquisition (Oct 2018) to engage with their potential audience. Some of their advertising campaigns are also designed to promote content on the Sendgrid blog and resource section. For example, the following ads direct traffic to Be an Email Superhero: 8 Ways to Beat Your 2018 Email Goals Right Now and Your Guide to Email A/B Testing and Optimizing Your Call to Action. Creating meaningful content for your customers establishes you as an expert in the industry, improves your SEO and in turn, contributes to lead generation.Overall, Sendgrid frequently experiments with their ad creatives—something Mailchimp can do more of. Additionally, they opt for a clear design, a compelling CTA, and noticeable branding in all their creatives, while the aesthetic features (like, background colour, logo placement, etc) and messaging changes constantly. Even though more than 75% of “advertising impact is determined by creative quality”, brands tend to focus more on ad targeting and placement. Implementing an A/B test is the best way to find out exactly the kind of creatives works for different audiences. Landing Pages Most of Sendgrid’s ad campaigns lead to the landing page below that includes an eye-catching illustration, data-driven copy that outlines their USPs, and a compelling CTA. Conclusion In terms of website traffic, Mailchimp globally ranks 330, whereas Sendgrid is currently at 11,510. With over $600 million in annual revenue, Mailchimp has doubled its valuation (to $4.2 billion) in the last 2 years. On the other hand, Sendgrid clocked in an estimated revenue of $97.8 million in 2018. Clearly, Mailchimp is more popular at the moment, however, Sendgrid isn’t too fair behind either. We’ll most likely be noticing an increased spend from both of them companies as the year goes on.