500% Subscription Base Growth through Facebook, Google, Bing, and TikTok Ads for a Meal-Kit Provider

+500% subscription base growth

Objectives

Growing customer base while optimizing cost per acquisition

Technology

Industry

eCommerce

About the Client

Hello Chef, a Dubai-based B Corp-certified meal-kit provider, delivers chef-curated recipes alongside pre-portioned, fresh ingredients to numerous households throughout the UAE. Through home delivery, customers minimize time spent on meal planning and grocery runs, maximizing moments to relish delectable cuisine. With a commitment to streamlining home cooking, Hello Chef emphasizes its dedication to delivering top-notch service, providing convenience, variety, and healthiness in every meal.

Challenges

2018: When we started working with Hello Chef, a small startup back then, the main challenge was to scale the business effectively.

2019: As the industry reach and competition grew, audiences started to saturate, which required building brand awareness and demand generation. The main objective became growth continuation in the light of increasing ad inventory prices and competition.

2020: The original objective for the year was the continuation of the growth in light of growing competition and saturation, which, due to the pandemic, changed to focusing on efficiency because of high demand.

2021: As the impact of the pandemic started to shift away and things went back to normal, resulting in decreasing demand, the main focus was to maintain the existing base and continue the growth.

2022: Further increase in advertising costs (CPMs and CPC), competition, and audience saturation put more pressure on scale, which needed to be solved.

Solution

Campaign Strategy

Improving and maximizing the efficiency of the bottom and middle of the consideration intent
Extending the reach and building more consideration
Re-shaping the paid acquisition strategy
Focusing on customer retention campaigns and USPs
Adopting acquisition strategy to the changing environment

2018: We established a solid analytics and data-collection infrastructure to improve and maximize the efficiency of the bottom and middle of the consideration intent. The focus was on search (Google Ads and Bing/Microsoft Ads).

2019: Then we decided to extend the reach and build more consideration by tapping into Google Ads, YouTube and Meta video inventory by leveraging hero campaign video ads.

2020: We re-shaped the paid acquisition strategy to focus on tactics driving customers with the highest potential life-time value (LTV) by leveraging search, intent-based video inventory, and customer reviews and unboxing video content to nurture them into customers.

2021: Further, we decided to focus on the following aspects:

Customer retention campaigns to hone on the product value and USPs to minimize the outflow of post-pandemic customers.
The paid acquisition became a part of the full funnel (including offline) of brand awareness and nurturing by positioning the product to make cooking an easy and joyful habit. The digital paid acquisition media mix was extended to include TikTok Ads for further reach.

2022: We adopted our acquisition strategy to the changing environment:

By working closely with Hello Chef’s other marketing teams (SEO, email, content), we re-balanced the media mix to have paid advertising to focus on awareness and prospecting.
By segmenting the audience (couples, singles, families) and delivering highly targeted messaging and value propositions for each addressing their pain points. That allowed to increase ads relevance and engagement and improve efficiency.
Further focusing on acquiring customers with high retention propensity to compensate for growing ad costs.

Results

The partnership with Hello Chef resulted in a remarkable 500% subscription base growth from 2018 to 2022, underscoring the efficacy of our endeavors.

2018: We managed to scale the paid advertising campaigns by over 100% by the end of the year, with the efficiency (CPA) remaining the same.
2019: We further scale the acquisition by over 56% YoY.
2020: Over 2X YoY paid acquisition growth driven by high demand with over 20% improvement in acquisition costs (CPAs).
2021: Paid traffic acquisition resulted in over 25% YoY growth.
2022: Paid traffic acquisition resulted in over 18% YoY growth.