ClickThrough increase leads for JDE by 511% using conversion-centric Paid Social campaigns

Learn how ClickThrough freshened up their approach to paid social and gained a 511% increase in conversions for JDE, while also improving quality of leads!

In our ongoing partnership with JDE, we were challenged to improve the quality of leads that were being achieved through our Paid Social activity.

JDE wanted to push their Pret Express coffee solution, which is a quick-service barista station. We were briefed to implement a B2B campaign for companies to sign up to get a Pret Express within their business.

Through adjusting our targeting and conversion sign-up process, we were able to increase leads by 511%, leading us to pause the campaign after it achieved its main objectives early.

JDE’s Objectives

The campaign initially launched in Nov 2021, where we were running a traffic-driving consideration campaign and lead gen convert campaign. We found that, with our initial targeting the campaigns weren't generating leads of the highest possible quality, and were being served to a smaller audience than we would like. The leads that were generated didn’t produce sales for the Pret Express team as the campaigns were reaching users who were not right for the services that the Pret Express campaign was offering.  

Our Strategy

To achieve our goals, we changed our user journey and refined our audience targeting;

Using a website conversion campaign to better inform users

Instead of running with just a platform lead generation form campaign, we recommended running a website conversion campaign where users sign up online. We hoped that changing the user journey would result in leads of higher quality as users are on the site and able to read through the JDE offerings. 

The users that sign up were then more informed than signing up through the platform form; which is a much quicker process and requires less opportunity to read into the Pret Express services.  

Adjusting targeting to expand our reach

In our initial campaign, we were targeting users within the forecourt and quick service restaurants (QSR) industries for our consideration phase, and we were using retargeting methods for the conversion phase. The retargeting audience consisted of website visitors and their lookalikes, from users who landed on the site in our consideration campaign. This meant our lead gen campaign audience was small and limited to users who'd already clicked.

When running the campaign again in 2022, we suggested expanding our audiences so the platform could auto-optimise to the users that would be most likely to sign up. We only ran with a convert phase but targeted the forecourt and QSR job titles within this phase rather than retargeting, this ensured our audience was broad enough, alongside sending users to the site to sign up.  

Our Results

Our campaign achieved an enormous 511% uplift in leads for JDE.

In our initial, 2021 campaign, we produced 61 leads at a cost per head that met expectations at the time. However, after implementing our optimisations we achieved 373 conversions.

Though this came at a slight increase in cost per conversion, the abundance of leads were of a higher quality and led to us pausing the campaign so JDE’s sales team could follow them all through.

Throughout the campaign, we worked with JDE to ensure that our recommendations and ideas were aligned with their sales goals, to ensure we were effectively targeting their ideal lead.

What our client said

“Pret Express campaign is a brilliant example of how testing & learning is essential in digital marketing. With the support of ClickThrough Marketing, together we carefully examined which testing areas will reveal to us what went wrong, and what is the best way to improve the campaign. Going through these steps with ClickThrough, the campaign was improved in so many ways that were beyond our KPIs! Special thanks to ClickThrough Team for their amazing knowledge and letting the Pret Express campaign become a real success story”

Seyda Alkin, Digital Marketing Specialist at JDE