THE INTRO
Scaling Up in a Saturated Market
In 2019, 2 years after Singapore’s Fastest Internet Service Provider ViewQwest launched in Malaysia, it expanded its infrastructure, enabling it to target the population of the entire country.
With the sudden exponential increase of its target audience, scaling-up while keeping a tight control over cost per acquisition was key to sustainable growth for the brand.
ViewQwest is Souteast Asia’s fastest internet service provider from Singapore. In 2017, ViewQwest entered the Malaysian market as the first foreign ISP in the country, where it’s been growing as a premium ISP in the B2C & B2B sector ever since.
THE CHALLENGE
Competing for Acquisition Channels
In the highly competitive Malaysian market of home internet providers, service resellers were the main channel of customer acquisition for the 3 competing market leaders.
As a newcomer, ViewQwest had to pay these resellers an even higher sales commission, in order to persuade these resellers to sell for ViewQwest instead of its competitors, compensating them for the lack of brand awareness and an increased difficulty to sell it caused.
As such, the profit margins of the company were heavily impacted and completely relying on this channel for scaling up in long term was not sustainable.
THE APPROACH
Enter Pay Per Click
Before ViewQwest’s market expansion, pay-per-click campaigns were unfeasible due to its small and geographically dispersed target audience, preventing this channel from becoming a significant channel of customer acquisition.
However, after the expansion of the company, the market of the entire country was available to address, allowing PPC to become an important lead generation channel. The main channels I used for the campaign were prospecting and remarketing campaigns on Facebook, Google Search & Display.
The main objective of the campaigns was lead generation. After lead submission, every lead had to be checked for service coverage in order to be a qualified lead with the possibility of conversion to a sale.
After running the campaigns for a few weeks, I was able to identify a large number of leads coming from areas with poor broadband penetration or in other words, areas with poor service coverage, resulting in leads that were not qualified and could not be served. This presented the greatest optimization opportunity until that point - I cross-referenced the most highly populated urbanized areas with the list of areas with greatest service coverage available. As a result, the rate of qualified leads increased, resulting in a 25% increase in total leads-to-sales conversion rate.
On top of that, thanks to its lower cost per sale, pay per click became a significant acquisition channel for the company soon after the launch of the campaign.
THE RESULTS
Not Going Back
The result of the carefully planned and optimized PPC campaigns was a 455% Return on Ad Spent and a 15% decrease in Cost Per Sales compared to the traditional reseller channel. Paid acquisition became a significant channel shortly after its launch, bringing in 23% of new sales. It is safe to say the company decided to keep growing the paid online acquisition channel, further investing more into online advertising budget and campaign optimization.
Return on Ad Spent
Thanks to ongoing optimization, my campaigns reached 455% ROAS.
Decrease in CAC
Customer Acquisition Cost compared to offline channel was 15% lower.
New Sales by Paid Acquisition
Sales generated by PPC represented 23% of all new sales soon after launching.
THE CONCLUSION
Scaling Up Sustainably
The introduction and optimization of Pay Per Click campaigns opened a new avenue for growth to the company, making its scale-up phase faster and more sustainable at the same time.
