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How SaladStop! transformed in the pandemic

How SaladStop! transformed in the pandemic

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This post was sponsored by ADA.

It wasn’t very long ago that customers would be queuing outside restaurants daily during lunchtime in Singapore. But as the pandemic gripped society, it made many businesses rethink the way in which they operate and market to their customers.

For SaladStop! the situation was no different. In Singapore, restaurant sales were down by 67%, and for SaladStop! – store footfall drastically decreased because the usual office crowd worked from home.

SaladStop! was a proactive player and rather than sit back and wait for the situation to improve, it decided to do something about it. It pivoted its business by taking the following steps:

  • Promoting its delivery service as an alternative to in-store pick-up.
  • Diving into eCommerce, and setting up an online grocer as supermarket sales grew 74.6%.
  • Establishing a cloud kitchen that brought all four of its brands under the same roof, together with a self-serve platform that gave them access to rich, first-party customer data.

With all the rapid business changes, SaladStop! needed a partner who was an expert in technology and could help it drive digital transformation. That’s when SaladStop! collaborated with ADA to solve challenges such as:

  • Driving more sales to existing and new platforms.
  • Tracking and measuring the performance.
  • Creating an accurate single customer view and delivering a better customer experience.
  • Enabling the in-house talent to grow their capabilities throughout our digital transformation.

The transformation journey

As a cornerstone for the project, ADA built a blueprint for digital marketing transformation success. It understood that digital transformation needed to involve the entire business. From a competitive audit and stakeholder interviews, to talent enablement and marketing technology (MarTech) implementation, every part of the business was dissected and explored, with strategies laid out to achieve five key areas of growth:

  • Strategy and execution.
  • Maximising value from technology.
  • Leveraging first party data.
  • Customer experience.
  • Upskilling in-house talent.

Starting with the customer

The pandemic had drastically altered consumer behaviour forcing brands to completely redesign the customer experience to meet new consumers’ expectations. ADA implemented both quantitative and qualitative research, including interviewing existing customers on how the pandemic had changed their lifestyle.

But it didn’t just take their word for it, it also looked through multiple digital touch-points, including web analytics and social engagement, to gain a better understanding of SaladStop!’s customers. A new customer journey was mapped out alongside a brand new contact strategy to onboard new customers, and in parallel, grow customer lifetime value.

Mining actionable insights from a comprehensive data audit

First-party data is often under-utilised in many businesses, but seeing this as a gold mine, ADA started by digging through the data at hand to better understand the existing performance. This was then paired with data extracted from XACT, ADA’s proprietary data management platform, to include geolocation, audience interests, and other datasets to build a wholesome and accurate single customer view, single store view, and business overview.

Testing and measuring

Once the data was consolidated, it was used to drive SaladStop!’s owned channels to communicate with segmented and existing customers. It was also used to inform paid efforts to reach new customers. This was done hand-in-hand with the client, where content and strategies were quickly tested, measured and optimised.

Maximising value with marketing technology

Businesses often sign off on MarTech only to struggle later when it comes to implementing or integrating said solutions in their current operations. ADA took the approach of analysing SaladStop!’s existing MarTech ecosystem first. Through this process ADA was able to derive the following recommendations:

  • Fully utilising the existing software features with tailored training by ADA.
  • Proposed technology ecosystem to better deliver desired customer experience.

SaladStop! was an early adopter of technology and scaled very quickly.

Through this exercise, ADA identified three key growth areas:

  • Modular build that is good for international scaling.
  • Utilising multiple specialist partners to grow together.
  • Tracking and setting measurement standards.

Enabling in-house talent

The core component to driving digital marketing transformation is the marketing talent behind the wheels. SaladStop! chose to maintain niche expertise such as creative, media buying, and technology while partnering with ADA to develop and lead the overall transformation.

In this journey, ADA adopted the “embedded to enablement” formula where knowledge transfer sessions were conducted to strategise and build essential in-house talent skills. This was to ensure the blueprint is maintained, and can be sustained by the business while improving the client’s digital marketing approach.

The results

A full digital marketing transformation helped SaladStop! survive the pandemic and the results speak for themselves.

Overall uplift in key business metrics include:

  • Customer acquisition: 58% increase in new customers compared to pre-pandemic.
  • Customer lifetime value: 23% increase in customer lifetime value compared to pre-pandemic.
  • CTR: 3x higher click-through rate compared to previous digital campaigns.
  • ROAS: 1.7x higher return on ad spend compared to previous digital campaigns.
  • Market productivity: 40% less manual work compared to before marketing technology optimisation.
  • Actionable single customer view: Fully connected marketing automation.

In this new world a lot of things have changed and the businesses that have changed with the times will continue to reach their customers, wherever they are.

To learn more, please click here.

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