You sit down at the table, take a sip of coffee and check your phone for overnight notifications; the ads are going well, you’ve already secured a few sales; your last post has already gained traction, everything is going smoothly.

Three notifications down, but, surprise!!! A disgruntled customer left you a negative review… what are you doing? “I’ve got to make it go away!” is the first thought that crosses your mind. And it sounds extremely convenient.

But what if there is a more beneficial alternative?

What if, instead of wasting your energy trying to hide the dirt under a bushel, you have a way to turn the problem into an opportunity for your business?

In business, as in life, everything bad is for the best, because the bad that happens to you can bring to light unforeseen opportunities and show you the way to a higher level in your business development.

You can say that a negative review is a problem. That it is a break in the gears of your business, a criticism of your work, a crack in the relationship of trust that you strive to build with your business customers.

That’s why the defensive reaction is the one that always appears first in your mind.

However, leaving aside sabotage actions by competitors [it happens, it’s a fact of life, shame on them], good negative reviews left by customers can bring to light problems that you and your team either didn’t know about, or you thought the situation wasn’t that bad, so “it’s okay”.

Well, it turns out it can’t “just go on” forever.

A hidden review means neglecting a customer’s complaint who was so interested in what you had to offer, and had such high expectations of you, that when they felt cheated, they felt it appropriate to take up valuable time to express their dissatisfaction.

So what could be worse for your business than a dissatisfied customer?

Answer: an unhappy customer who also feels ignored.

Sure, they may choose to ignore you in turn at some point, and eventually lose you for good. “So what? There are still enough customers for me in the market, it’s not the end of the world”, you say to yourself.

And maybe so, but an unhappy customer will do far more harm to your business than writing you a negative review in plain sight; instead, he’ll be careful to give negative feedback about your business to all the people he comes into contact with, looking for the products or services you sell.

So, instead of thinking about how to hide a negative review, you should locate the problem raised by the customer’s dissatisfaction and consider the options you have to solve this problem.

This will give you the chance to turn a potential threat to your business into an opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your customers, by coming out and showing that you are listening to their complaints, and that you are working hard to solve their problems, and they can continue to trust your business.

What’s in it for you in the end?

• Customer loyalty
• Recommendations
• More customers
• More sales
• A better performing business

The post You received a negative review. Is that bad? Yes, but it’s also good appeared first on re7consulting Romania.

elefant.ro is one of the largest players on the Romanian e-commerce market, with a wide offer that currently totals over 1 million products in the categories of books, toys, watches, perfumes, clothing, footwear, accessories, cosmetics and personal care products, electronics and appliances.

Through the intense promotional activity carried out in the last 13 years in the Romanian digital space, and not only, elefant.ro brand has already gained the trust of millions of customers and offers solid expansion prospects supported by continuous investments in online marketing.

In the digital space, elefant.ro follows a strategic direction of omnichannel promotion, with a major focus on the main promotion platforms active in Romania, Google Ads being one of them.

Last year, elefant.ro management decided that it was time to reposition itself on a more performing direction, and for that they chose to enter into a new partnership with re7consulting Romania agency.

It’s been a year since the first steps we took together, so it’s time to draw the line and see if Elefant.ro’s decision to materialize its new strategic direction with us was a wise decision.

The first step in the collaboration with our partners at elefant.ro was made during a meeting that took place in March 2022, where we were presented very clearly the objectives we were aiming for, together with the new financial premises: realignment on a new direction of promotional performance, mainly focused on ensuring a stable continuity of the sales volume recorded in the previous year, achieved by trying to optimize as much as possible the marketing costs Year Over Year [YOY].

Proposed new strategic vision

The proposal from elefant.ro was a challenge for us, to which we responded with a new strategic vision focused entirely on the assumption of a new paradigm in which each invested RON had to return a result, if not a conversion, at least a clearly measurable indicator that would give us a valuable clue in the optimization process.

Equally important was the adaptation of the proposed new strategy to integrate other essential metrics for the elefant.ro brand, such as increasing brand visibility and increasing user interaction with the brand.

Therefore, the main strategic direction that, from our analysis, had a real potential to align with the proposed objectives, was the optimization of the targeting process.

Because of the large stock of products and its diversity, the challenge we faced from the beginning was to integrate in the promotion plan the product categories with the highest level of interest, both for elefant.ro and for potential customers, and to manage the campaigns in real time to constantly adapt the promotion strategy.

Fortunately, we enjoyed permanent support from our partners, through daily availability and permanent communication on the dedicated dialogue channels established at the beginning of the collaboration.

Our approach was different from the beginning, and it is important to mention here that, although we have analyzed in detail the history of campaigns created in the past on the Google Ads account of the elefant.ro tree, we felt that an adoption of the strategies implemented in the past would not give us real chances to align effectively with the new strategic direction.

As a result, the campaign history we found on the account did not form the basis of the proposed new marketing strategy.

Instead, we decided to materialize the new strategic direction of promotion by integrating new types of campaigns that did not exist in the Google Ads account history: Performance Max campaigns, where we chose to direct 90% of the budget and intensively test different placements for ads in Search, Display, Shopping, YouTube, Discovery and Gmail.

What did we get?

ROAS 12 at a six figure budget and a 37% optimization of the budget allocated YOY (year over year) in Google Ads

with only a 5% decrease in total campaign revenue, although the actual number of conversions increased by 9% and the conversion rate by 200%, which already gives us new opportunities for up and cross sale through retargeting campaigns.

We also recorded a decrease of only 9% in the number of clicks recorded from the campaigns we ran, but we put this down to a much more precise targeting process, which led to the elimination of clicks with no real conversion value. This premise is also supported by the 37% increase in the YOY click rate and the 30% decrease in the average cost per click.

So, if we draw the line, from March 2022 to February 2023, we have managed to deliver almost the same volume of Google Ads sales to the elephant.ro brand compared to the same period of the previous year, as well as delivering 12x the six-figure investment to the retailer, with a 37% lower promotion budget.

Do you need to reposition your business’s marketing campaigns on a higher performance line? Contact us today and let’s have a talk!

The post How we delivered 12x elefant.ro’s investment in Google Ads, with 37% less budget appeared first on re7consulting Romania.