HelloFresh boosts digital marketing campaigns, increasing conversion rates with Tableau

HelloFresh supplies fresh food and recipes directly to consumer households in ten international markets. Everything needed for the weekly meals is meticulously organized for each subscriber, sourced locally and delivered to the doorstep at the desired time. Based on a subscription model with any-time cancellation, HelloFresh uses subscribers' weekly orders to manage supply chains and demand in a consistent manner and to enhance the customer experience.

HelloFresh deployed the Tableau platform to centralize global performance reporting, saving 10-20 man hours per day and providing regional sales and marketing teams with real-time data for nimble decision making. As a result, the HelloFresh marketing team can react to trends in customer behavior and optimize marketing campaigns on-the-fly, leading to better conversion rates and improved customer loyalty.

HelloFresh regularly carries out online marketing campaigns in all regional markets—including text or banner advertising on various publisher websites—to convey its messages and attract new customers to its website. The marketing team also analyzes click behavior from both prospects and existing customers on the HelloFresh website to identify opportunities to improve conversion rates.

In the past, teams analyzed data in Excel, bringing in data from Google Analytics and various MySQL production databases. Due to the agile nature of the HelloFresh marketing team, this data had to be consistently downloaded, aggregated, and analyzed to yield up-to-date results. The daily production of daily and weekly performance reports required between one and four hours of manual work for each of HelloFresh’s ten regions—and the process often did not provide the desired insights.

Karl Villanueva, Head of Search Engine Advertising and Display at HelloFresh shared, "The speed of digital marketing is so great that we always have to make decisions in real time. We can't wait a quarter of a year, we can't wait six months or a whole year. We have to make decisions based on what happened yesterday or last week."

When Karl Villanueva joined HelloFresh, one of his first tasks was to centralize global reporting for all ten regions in the Berlin branch, starting by introducing Tableau on a company-wide scale. Today, all of HelloFresh’s data sources go through ETL processes into a data warehouse, running on Hadoop. The team then connects directly to the data warehouse to analyze data in Tableau.

Karl’s team developed a set of key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards that show click rates, bounce rates, and conversion rates, along with sales and retention metrics. They set up automatic refreshes and subscriptions in Tableau Server so that stakeholders receive daily updates every morning across all ten regions.

“We are very democratic with our data at HelloFresh, because we do not want to store them in silos,” says Karl. “If there's any marketing data that might be of interest to other teams, we're happy to share it with them."

Previously, analyzing customer data primarily in Excel made it virtually impossible to map the lifetime customer journey across different channels and platforms.

Karl explained, "With the increasing proliferation of cross-channel marketing and cross-device marketing with the associated assignment difficulties, we absolutely need an aggregated source to assess performance from a superior perspective and not separately, not in data silos."

The ability to consolidate data sources into Tableau dashboards allows the HelloFresh marketing team to discover interesting behavior patterns from both prospects and existing customers across various channels and devices: “For example, lets say someone discovered the product in a feature article on our blog and later learned more about the product, but perhaps wanted to think about it some more. Maybe he/she planned a trip this week and because of that, decided to make a purchase in the following week,” says Karl. “In this case, it is important for a marketing team to recognize the correlation between the ad seen today and the purchase decision—perhaps a few days later or even further in the future."

As a results of faster analysis, the marketing team analyzed click behavior on the website and retention periods across pages to determine three typical customer personas: the customer looking to try new recipes, the customer who wants fresh ingredients, but has trouble getting to the grocery store, and the customer interested in special ingredients that are often difficult to obtain locally. With these insights, the HelloFresh marketing team can segment target groups and present them with relevant advertising and landing pages. This also affects how content is presented on the HelloFresh website.

"Marketing should not be a pain, but should be relevant. Our marketing should not distract the customer, but rather provide them with answers to their individual questions," explains Karl Villanueva. “If we know that they are interested in certain ingredients, we will present them with the right recipes. If we suspect, based on their history, that they would like to buy something from us, we present the shop pages."

This approach leads to a positive customer experience and as a result, increased conversion rates and higher customer loyalty.

With automated dashboard updates, regional marketing managers can understand overall campaign and sales performances across different territories. Leadership can also compare weekly metrics across regions to benchmark success.

With current data, the team can be nimble and adjust campaigns as necessary. For example, if a team discovers that a digital advertisement isn’t delivering the desired results, they can take action to adjust the creative or messaging to ensure an optimal return on investment for the campaign.

Karl Villanueva explains, "Tableau dashboards save us so much time in our daily work. We have found that it has made our lives much easier because we receive important information immediately and are able to react faster."

When asked what advice he would give newcomers to performance marketing, Karl shared, "Marketing is increasingly influenced by data. It is more competitive and is based more on facts and figures than ever before. Today you will get much more insight. Moreover, in order to quantify the figures properly, you must be able to analyze them sensibly. And Tableau is definitely a big help for that."