Digital Acquisition
The Digital Acquisition Machine
Red Ventures is an American company, with an office in Brazil led by former senior McKinsey and other consultancies members. Although the RV brand itself is not well-known to outsiders of the industry, many of the brands owned by RV are present in US citizens' daily lives.
If the web was a city, RV would be sort of an owner of many of the most valuable real estate properties in that city. One of their business is to buy "low valuable properties" that have a lot of potential and make them become valuable by driving a lot of traffic there.
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During most of my time there, I worked on a project that had 3 main stakeholder companies. I will call them "The product company" - that owns the physical product managed by an app and the 2 of the biggest Latin American companies, which owned the Joint Venture on the product company and partnered with us daily so we could leverage their huge customer base of millions of customers to cross-sell the product.
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What I like the most about this experience are the big numbers and clear results. At one point, I was the main operational responsible for a 7-digit Google and Facebook Ads budget and I was sending 80 million marketing emails per month, to 20 million people (not including transactional emails) and thousands of B2B emails.
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Yes, you did not read it wrong. Everything was on the level of millions.
Except for the number of landing pages we had, which fluctuated but was "only" 60 on average, to accommodate multiple customer segments from the 2 stakeholders' large customer base based on specific prices and product offerings they should have access to.
Actually, if you are Brazilian, there is a good chance you have already received my emails in your inbox.
I know this because most of my friends received my emails, sometimes complaining about how often they got it, but still purchasing our product nevertheless.
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A fun fact here is that a few times an operational error would happen and emails would be sent with an empty subject or with a grammar mistake. Curiously, those emails always had super high open rates.
Unfortunately, making this the official strategy was not a possibility. Not only because communications would look weird and unprofessional, but because of something I learned back then: the e-mail marketing landscape is always evolving.
There are obviously some best practices one should always follow, such as avoiding spammy words or keeping the title within a certain number of characters. However, the best thing to do usually depends on what other people are doing.
For example, we found out through A/B testing that email subjects with emojis on average performed slightly better. But that was because only a few companies were using emojis back then. If everybody started using emojis, probably the emails without them would draw more attention. That's why it is a never-ending competition that can only be won by those who can test and iterate fast.
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I also liked the fact that I sold a product that thousands of people were using every day and that had a crazy number of daily visitors on the site. Any change we made, even if small, had a significant impact on the metrics we were continuously watching, given that we had over 200-500 thousand unique visitors/month.
Testes and improvements were made at all the stages of the funnel: in the emails and ads shown, in the landing pages and purchase flows, and also while building new acquisition experiences.
Nonetheless, the biggest jump in sales occurred with the launch of a new offer, which drastically reduced the cost of the monthly product fees for the end user. We saw the number of sales grow from 10 to 100 thousand units per month, going literally one order of magnitude higher.​
A huge marketing campaign was launched to communicate the new offering. Campaigns were live every day of the week in prime time, for example during "Fantástico" and the famous "Novela das 9" from the Rede Globo TV channel.
Huge, right? I remember the first time we went on TV and the whole team was watching our propaganda while monitoring all the metrics in a Zoom call to make sure the application would handle all the volume increase well: Google Analytics number of visitors would not stop going up!
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But perhaps the most interesting thing is the fact that most of this was managed by an extremely lean team of ~7 people. I joined the team when there was a Senior PM, 2 front-ends, 2 back-ends, and one designer. Reporting directly to one of the directors, who in turn reported himself to the CEO of Red Ventures Brazil. After about 9 months, I became the most senior PM on the team, having the opportunity to train 2 younger PMs who joined us.
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The launch of the "special product offering" that boosted sales 10x was a special challenge to me, given the need to coordinate numerous things with multiple teams from each of the 3 companies we were working with.
Everything was within a super short period of time combined with the fact that my direct manager was on paternity leave and my partner on the business side had just left the company.
It was a super fast-paced but super rewarding challenge to own before spending a few months working at Onze, a series A fintech owned by RV.
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Unfortunately, I can't share more details given to confidentiality agreements, but I can say I'm glad for the opportunity to have met amazing people and worked in an advanced data analytics environment that allowed me to wear multiple hats and have a lot of growth and fun.
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At Red Ventures, I learned that a few folks using technology smartly can deliver A LOT.