DeinSchrank.de.
Identifying the potentials of online marketing and executing on this strategy for long-term growth.
DeinSchrank.de is a German company that sells made-to-measure furniture online in the DACHC region as well as the Netherlands. The company manages their own local production facilities and resulting high-quality products. Maintaining growth while improving their marketing strategy became a main challenge after profiting heavily from the Covid pandemic. After a marketing due diligence at the end of 2021 GANDT has been supporting DeinSchrank.de in a wide variety of marketing and website-related topics.
They came to us, GANDT, so we could identify which opportunities existed and help define the requirements to scale up their marketing, tech and organizational setup. We have since been supporting DeinSchrank.de with marketing, organizational and website related projects that have laid the foundations for future revenue growth with a healthier bottom-line.
Initial Situation.
There was a growing trend during the Covid pandemic for some demographics to improve their space usage and homes. Made-to-measure furniture that could be configured and ordered online had already seen growth prior to that, but an even stronger organic surge was driven by the lockdowns.
The question that Equivia asked us at the time was: what opportunities are there in digital to find new customers and engage with existing ones, beyond what they were doing already? After Covid this question became even more pertinent, as the pull marketing tactics relied on previously (Search Engine and Direct Mail Marketing) struggled to maintain growth as the sale trend slowed and new players entered the marketplace.
Audit for DeinSchrank.de
Leveraging DNA, GANDT’s full service support programme, an audit in December 2021 identified the opportunities and challenges in DeinSchrank’s marketing set up. Combined with on-site sparring sessions with management to define strategies, targets and roadmaps, the first three months showed that the opportunity was there to build a long-term advantage. A key output was an organizational requirements audit where it became clear how to reinforce the core competences within the team, like their customer relationship management.
Our role has been to advise on those gaps in the team that need to be supplemented externally with a new support structure (such as content creation and media buying). A full review of their user flows, website capabilities, creative potential, service setup and marketing and advertising health, pinpointed what those next steps should be.
After that we took responsibility for the execution of the shared plan which evolved into an interim, hands-on role managing the team’s media-buying and product development deliverables. Our key goals during this intricate partnership were to:
- Establish which market opportunities exist and what assets of the group will deliver a long-term advantage
- Define the requirements to scale the business in the next 12 – 24 months across their tech stack, organizational structure, team setup and marketing investments
- Give transitional operational support whilst building/growing the team and improving their automation and performance marketing setup, primed for the next seasonal sale cycle
- Manage SEO, Paid media and Analytics during a successful website relaunch leading to a broader project to simplify tracking and centralize DeinSchrank’s data management
- More efficient marketing costs and a lighter operational infrastructure, means UX, CRO and CRM work can be tackled in the next phase and ensure revenue growth and profitability for the long-term
“Stepping in to support a Brand that was seeing the same post-Covid lull that many other retailers experienced meant we could tackle projects across enough touchpoints to give us a clear understanding of what’s needed for future growth. Using digital toolsets and strategies we’re implementing real organizational change that will drive profitability for the next seasons.” Cecilia Scheid, Director
Project Plan.
-
01Phase 1: Discover
Marketing Due DiligenceThe initial phase was an opportunity for GANDT to carry out an assessment of the company’s historical performance in order to establish an efficient team setup and manage its current activities.
Developing a relationship with all team members and understanding their individual goals was a key first step in the project work, and an important foundation to build trust. With members of the client team leaving and new people joining, GANDT’s role was to assist team building and internal alignment. Daily operational conversations, weekly marketing team sessions and team management updates, helped provide progress updates, seal the strategies and understand the company matrix.
Together the main opportunities, areas of improvement and recommendations were identified leading to the creation of a multi-year media plan. This project focused on all marketing channels including resource requirements, optimization topics and seasonal effects.
Furthermore, the project roadmap was planned at this stage to weigh up the technical, infrastructure needs for the year. This would allow for a smoother, more streamlined organization, which would benefit the bottom-line during scale up.
-
02Phase 2: Accelerate
Interim Support for Tracking and SEOAs work progressed with DeinSchrank.de it became necessary to reassess and implement short term fixes for SEO on the main websites. These were suffering from structural and technical issues that had accumulated over time.
Additionally, since the company had been lacking someone versed in tracking that previous last year, the web tracking setup was not up to date. The teams were subsequently unable to analyze as well as they wanted and decisions were not based on the right data. This created general mistrust in analytics, metrics and therefore campaign results.
The relaunch of the local language Dutch website provided the ideal scenario for GANDT to address this data gap, whilst supporting a smooth transition for SEO and Paid Media content. GANDT was able to analyze the large tracking setups, which contained hundreds of deprecated tags.
Together with DeinSchrank they took the decision to rebuild the web-tracking from scratch. This work was initiated with a focus on the Dutch website, which had already been recently relaunched and was therefore used as a blueprint for both the new, and larger, German website and its updated web-tracking setup.
-
03Phase 3: Accelerate
Data Management and TrackingDeinSchrank.de had built an impressive custom data warehouse, collecting data on bookings, products and buyer behavior for over ten years. Due to the lack of in-house personnel working in this area, the data had never been visualized or thoroughly analyzed, nor had it been available in an automated manner.
Together with the DeinSchrank IT-Team which provided AWS-hosted tables, GANDT built up a new Tableau environment, a user-friendly data visualization tool, to best capture the data points.
This revolved around analyzing buying behaviors, product category development, AOVs connected to micro-conversions, cohort analyses and cost and revenue developments over time. These were sliced into a multitude of dimensions, such as countries, product categories and more, all essential layers of sales and customer data that will be built on to supercharge the ecommerce tactics in the seasons to come.
-
04Phase 4: Accelerate
Optimization of performance marketing activitiesGANDT coached the team at Deinschrank.de for social media marketing activities and gradually took over management of the performance accounts on Google, Bing and Criteo. This entailed an entire rebuild of the outdated campaign structures, which were redone to enable the switch from manual cost-per-click bidding towards automated bidding strategies.
This allowed the team to switch time spent on manual efforts such as bid management towards building new campaigns, optimizing ads and ultimately developing a more efficient way to manage the accounts. Having also set up various new microconversions, the accounts are now able to be managed and optimized based on Return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) and can be much more effectively analyzed within the full marketing mix.
With a clear visual element to the DeinSchrank business, using home furniture imagery was a clear benefit. The GANDT team developed an automated shopping feed strategy that would rely on it’s PPD imagery so that the full power of the Shopping features on Google, Bing and other platforms could be leveraged for sales.
-
05Phase 5: Navigate
Consulting and SparringThroughout these phases, GANDT provided continuous consulting on a variety of topics with DeinSchrank’s investors, Equivia and their upper management. These ranged from more operational or technical topics, to infrastructure or strategic ones. This could include support on product management decisions or SEO best practices. On the strategic side talks could vary from organizational setups to media and resource planning and seasonal or market-specific tactics.
With key foundational projects having been delivered in the first half year creating data clarity, lighter setups, marketing efficiency and operational know-how, the next phase is focused on growing new sales and customer retention.
By co-creating with GANDT around the ecommerce needs for UX (user experience), CRO (conversion rate optimization) and CRM (customer relationship management), DeinSchrank will be in a much healthier long-term position to drive profitability, with growth.