Our time working with The Bunch
Student Bills packages – Household Bills, the easy way
Who are The Bunch?
The Bunch helps young people around the UK manage their household bills by offering student bills packages; Gas, Electricity, Water, Wi-Fi and TV Licence in one simple payment. The Bunch doesn’t just remove the hassle of sharing bills for housemates, but simultaneously increases revenue and reduces admin for agents and landlords.
How did we help?
- Integrated Marketing strategy
- Facebook Ad campaigns
- Data Framework implementation
- Social analysis
- Website build
- Blog commissioning and SEO
- CRM strategy and Active Campaign build
- Email, SMS, landing page and chatbot implementation
- Customer Journey modification
- Multi utility bill quoting tool build
- Full integrated sales Strategy
- Training sessions
How did it start?
Our work with The Bunch began in much the same way as a number of our client relationships do. A simple task, but as they, us and our relationship grew over time, it became much more than that.
“We just need some Facebook Ads…”
An innocent enough thought. A lot of organisations believe that with good advertising they can deliver themselves a steady stream of high-quality leads, and while to a point this is true, the reality is often far different. To effectively deliver for a client, we can’t just focus on ads, they are just the first step in a process to capture, evaluate and grow a pipeline.
But never-the-less we set out to show what could be done with cohesive top of funnel activity.
The Bunch had fashioned themselves a strong brand identity already and their tone of voice resonated well with students, particularly those with a fondness for festivals, club nights and bucket hats. We used this as our stepping off point and created a range of ads that could loosely be divided into service-based ads and humour-based ads presented in a meme format that has proved so successful with Gen Z.
All the creatives were made in-house and we were keen to not just convey The Bunch’s service proposition but also that they were a young, relatable organisation themselves. You can see the CEO Elliott in the first ad. The ads were trialled, scaled, shown to different audiences, with different creative and copy. Geographic targeting and messaging were used to increase personalisation and conversions.
To ensure a consistent brand across the social channels we were advertising on and to help further generate leads we also consulted with the Bunch around their social strategy. This enabled them to run social sharing competitions that increased their brand awareness and social page follows but also generated a large number of quotes. We were then able to retarget ads to those who had engaged in these competitions and to their connections.
What’s next?
“It’s not all about Facebook ads after all…. Surprise surprise”
The Data Game
We like to ask questions. What proportion of your leads are converting into sales? What does the customer journey look like? How are you keeping them engaged with the brand when they’re not ready to buy?
Enter data – We love data, and as a result of our time working together, now so do The Bunch. We had started looking at Facebook ads and had quickly reached a point where their ads were performing up to 10 times better than when we started in terms of cost per click (CPC), with social engagement and website traffic increasing drastically as a result. It quickly became apparent that indeed, there is always more to it than just Facebook Ads and that in order to fully utilise the results they were getting, The Bunch needed tracking in place.
Our next task was to put in place a data framework that ensured we understood where leads were coming from, how they progressed through the site, and what happened to them next. Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio were a critical component of this, alongside Facebook Business Manager. This enabled full “event” tracking across the site and therefore the optimisation of ads based on this data.
CRM and customer journeys
A good CRM is the backbone to many businesses. It’s not simply a place to safely store and update your customer records but the focal point of your digital marketing. A place to launch campaigns, nurture clients and track team progress. For the Bunch, we landed on Active Campaign.
We created a CRM strategy that placed a strong emphasis on email, SMS and chatbot nurturing.
Using Active Campaign we were able to correctly tag and order The Bunch’s customers and contacts to make their status easily viewed & updated by the sales team but also be able to correctly segment them into email & SMS campaigns.
We could then use this data to weight leads and ultimately help the sales team to understand the most valuable leads; based on that leads engagement with the brand over time.
We set up multiple conditional workflows that were tailored to the ad and message that had brought them to The Bunch in the first place. This ensured we were getting the right messages to the right audience, timed in a way to nurture interest without overwhelming the recipient.
We utilised landing pages and Chatbots for our ads, so for those who came via Chatbot’s we continued to nurture using extensive Chatbot workflows, built in Manychat, to perpetuate engagement.
From Facebook ads to a full integrated Marketing Strategy
All of these methods were components of the integrated marketing strategy that was required to fully maximise the potential of the Bunch’s funnel. No one area could be looked at in isolation, no data could be siloed, and all actions had to be looked at with an understanding of how the sales and marketing efforts were inextricably linked. This involved not just creating and implementing the strategy but actively engaging in qualitative and quantitative feedback from all departments of the business to understand how successful actions were being, and to tweak and iterate where necessary.
Now we were beginning to build a holistic data view of the Bunch’s leads and customers. Where they were coming from, the actions they were taking and the messages that converted them. Now with such an array of data at our disposal we needed to be able to present it to The Bunch management team in such a way that they could quickly understand and interpret the data. For this we created a custom dashboard, highlighting the data most pertinent to their business success.
Now we had the ability to build brand awareness, generate leads, nurture them to sale and evaluate every step of the journey with real time data. This allowed us to iterate and make improvements at every step of this journey and upskill The Bunch team to do the same.
Sales and Marketing
The work we had done with the Bunch so far had proved valuable to all involved. Now we were able to build upon our initial success. With the knowledge we had gained, we could consult with them around their future sales and marketing strategy.
A key part of this was looking at the user-experience across the site and helping The Bunch improve this as well as their quoting mechanism. We then began to assess other options for sales and marketing improvement. This covered everything from defining a new site structure to web copy changes to the introduction of Google Search ads. Even implementing a new CRM that could handle the more granular strategic approach that was defined.
Now, the marketing stack we had created was reliably delivering leads. It was mapped across touchpoints with a robust data framework. It was now time to begin the next stage of our relationship with The Bunch. The next step was defining and delivering the strategy to launch their brand new proposition.
The Result:
- 50% reduction in ad costs
- Lowest ever converting ad at 12p CPC
- Reduction in staff costs through automation
- We found an issue with how they are measuring conversions and implemented a data back end
- Using data, improved their conversion rates across the pipeline
- Typically, a CPA of around £20 for a product value of £400
What does The Bunch have to say?
“Working with The Cake Mix was an important part of our early development as a Prop-tech start-up. The team did a great job at supporting my guys. I highly recommend them”
Elliott Herrod-Taylor
CEO – The Bunch
