Wayne
It’s been a while. Hi!
It’s been a little while since you’ve heard from us in terms of our end of month blog, partly because I’ve been juggling multiple roles within the business as we continue to hire new team members, and partly because we’ve been waiting for our new Senior Marketing Executive, Izzy, to join. Izzy has been drafting Twilo’s marketing strategy and you can hear more from her below…
I’ve been working equally ‘in the business’ and ‘on the business’ since the turn of the year, with really good progress being made both in terms of the websites, apps and marketing campaigns we’ve launched, as well as working with Jen to progress Growth40.
Business Growth Plans
Growth40 is the title we’ve given to our ambitions growth plans which we set out to achieve from 2023. Upon agreeing our plans, we found that we had to get serious with some internal processes in order to set the business up for sustained growth, and I feel we’ve got through a lot of that which has moved the business into a position where we are able to proceed with our plans. This includes marketing Twilo to new customers for the first ever time! This is equally exciting and ironic. Ironic that we’ve never really marketed the business despite delivering highly successful digital marketing campaigns for our clients, and ironic that our own website hasn’t been updated for about 7 years. Exciting because we have an amazing team with experience of marketing across many sectors and channels.
It may seem like a risky time to be launching new marketing campaigns following the recent news of a recession in the UK, but my experiences tells me that opportunities emerge due to other businesses reducing their spend in response to economic downturn. Thankfully, Twilo has the experience to maximise opportunities – not just for us, but for the many clients who trust us to manage their marketing spend effectively through what will be a challenging period.
Maximising Google Ads Returns During Challenging Times
Speaking of which, we’ve achieved fantastic results for one of our long-standing e-commerce clients. As customers’ purse strings tighten, special attention has been given to reducing the cost-per-click and increasing the conversion rate of their Google Ads campaigns.
We’ve achieved this by really tightening up on the negative keywords (the most important part of a Google Ads campaign if you ask me), as well as giving the campaigns a thorough review; ensuring all fields and ads are filled in with the maximum amount of information available, while tweaking our audiences to be as specific as possible in terms of who we are targeting.
This has resulted in a ‘return on ad spend’ (ROAS) of 14.09 in 2024. For those who might not know what this means, ROAS is calculated by dividing the total revenue by the amount spent. This particular account has returned £14.09 for every £1 spent in 2024.
According to finder.co, a good e-commerce ROAS is 2.87 (for the record I think this is very poor and if your advertising agency is giving you a ROAS of only 2.87 I suggest you leave immediately). This shows the consistent results we’ve achieved for this one particular client, and supported by a new year sale in January, we’ve been able to maintain a really strong ROAS since the sale was removed due to the additional data we gained from the traffic available.
Maybe the most rewarding part for myself – as I’m driven by quality – is that the client is really appreciative of the results we have achieved. And who wouldn’t be?
Spend £1 to return £14? Sign me up!
Andrew
March 2024In March, I have done much learning into Domain Name Server (DNS) functions, and worked on some exciting projects such as a new journey for a finance application. Additionally, I have spent some time upgrading old projects to make sure we keep up-to-date with the latest framework and PHP versions. I still struggle to believe that PHP 8.0 is deprecated. It only feels like yesterday that it was the prominent version. During my free time this month, I have laid back playing video games and will be visiting friends over Easter.
Domain Name Server (DNS)
When working in the web industry, problems with websites going live or maintaining websites is more common than you’d like. With this and the increasing need for security, it is becoming more important to make sure that we have a strong understanding on the fundamentals of the internet. I’ve spent some time studying and applying what I now know to enhance the security on emails sent with the domains we control and to debug any DNS issues we have faced.
Keeping up with Upgrades
Both PHP and Laravel are seeing frequent updates and older versions are becoming obsolete. I am spending some time making sure that new projects we develop or are developing keep up with the changes of the frameworks and languages we use. This is important for security and compatibility. We want to make sure that the websites and apps we build remain secure for the users but also compatible with newer coding technologies which ultimately will broaden our opportunities.
Invoice Finance Journey
Invoice Finance is now the seventh journey that we have built for a finance application called Lender Hub. In these journeys, users can answer questions based on the type of finance they are looking for. The system then matches them with the best and most suitable loans from a range of different lenders.
Despite being one of the simpler journeys I have produced, it still involved some features that I have not worked on before and so required some innovation. One such feature is allowing a question that does not want an answer. This could be just a notice that the user should accept before continuing. The challenges with this are carefully allowing the use of these new features whilst maintaining a clean and well-structured coding environment. We are already on seven journeys. We don’t want code all over the system which is not reusable. Whenever I add new functionality, I make sure it is designed in a way that would allow future journeys to easily make use of that functionality too. This helps us work efficiently and maintain a clean system.
Video Games of the Month
Thanks to the Spring sale on the popular PC gaming platform known as Steam, a couple of friends and I managed to pick up Battlefield V for just £6. The Battlefield series of games are multiplayer first person shooters, where you are fighting in large scale battles. This release of the game is set in WW2. I remember playing this years ago on a subscription but didn’t enjoy it very much in the current state. We decided to try it again as it still has a substantial player base and was selling for cheap. I have to say it’s a lot better now, however some matches are absolutely dominated by the enemy who have played the game too much!
Other than Battlefield, I have been playing a fair bit of Age of Wonders 4. This is a game that has you leading your own empire in a fantasy world. It’s a difficult but satisfying game to play, full of strategy and storytelling.
Easter Holidays
To end the month, I am looking forward to seeing some friends over the Bank Holiday. We are going to stay the night, eat some snacks, and play the Skyrim board game. We tend to have this ‘get together’ every few months to catch up with each other. We also play some of the tabletop games that usually have long play times which require multiple sessions. It’s always good fun.
