Multipharma is a premium distributor of pharmaceutical and para-pharmaceutical products in Belgium, with a strong focus on customer service and advice. The company’s historical backbone is a network of today over 270 pharmacies in the Belgian market. Recently, the online e-commerce channel has been added to the retail mix.

Galvanized by the high sales ambitions for 2019 and low Q1 results, they contacted us to tackle several challenges:

• To increase the e-commerce revenue growth
• To install best-in-class customer acquisition funnels and boost conversion rates.
• To accelerate digital maturity in order to determine the key tactics for success and identify the opportunity gaps.
• To support the digital gap and to transfer knowledge to the current team for similar approaches in future.

Bridging the knowing-doing gap

To make a success of this Growth Marketing project, we applied our 5-step approach:

1. Quick analysis
   

• We deep dived into the sector/segment (competition benchmark) and current e-commerce setup.
• We built a calculation model to determine the potential of different scenarios.
  
  

2. Ideate & prioritize
   

• We set up a series of workshops to discuss digital growth barriers & drivers identified via the growth & reversed funnel.
• On that basis, we co-created a long-list of ideas that impact revenue growth which is constantly being added to.
  
  

3. Test preparation
   

• We prioritized the long-list of ideas and translated them into experiment sheets.
• We created and configured the assets to get the experiments up and running.
  
  

4. Killing/Scaling rounds
   

• We evaluated the generated sales on a continuous basis and killed/scaled campaigns in (bi-)weekly sprints.
• We continuously monitored the quality of the generated sales and optimized our campaigns.
  
  

5. Report
   

• We developed a manual with the approach, results and best practices in order to transfer this knowledge to Multipharma team
  

The success of this project lies in the composition of the team: Marketing architects from The House of Marketing, and Digital Growth experts from Upthrust. While THoMers have an holistic view on growth and help with challenging the business cases per scenario, Upthrusters focus on defining growth strategies and making execution successful thanks to a deep Growth Marketing expertise. By drawing on these complimentary profiles and skills, we tackled this joined project via various angles and achieved relevant business growth.

Leaving our fingerprint behind

1. We launched 16 experiments + different variants per experiment and tested as much as possible.
   
   
2. For the NL region we set up 52 campaigns/6,342 ads. And for the FR region we set up 25 campaigns/2,460 ads. Several channels were used: AdWords, Email, Facebook, Google Shopping and Smart Shopping.
   
   
3. We more than doubled the monthly revenue from 43.2K in June to 111.2 K in September and increased the number of transactions per month exponentially from 922 to 2,376 in less than 4 months.
   
   

"Growth Marketing was the right step to bring our e-commerce activities to the next level. It has changed our way of working, challenged our assumptions and got us the recipe for success in a very short amount of time."

- E-commerce Manager Multipharma

Insights and learnings from the project 

1. Definition of your OMTM (One matric that matters), the key to a successful experiment. Start off by getting a good grasp of both company and customer value creation. Then, don’t forget to balance acquisition & retention. And, last but not least, make it simple and memorable. If you want to assess different services/products, you need to define an OMTM for each of them.
   
   
2. The big campaign idea doesn’t exist. Test as many experiments as possible, you can truly know whether something works or not by experimenting with it.
   
   
3. Install a rapid experimentation mindset in your team. These growth experiments are minimum viable tests that you set up to define the growth lever(s) on which you can build your growth.
   
   
4. Don’t get emotional, only take number-based decisions instead of going by your gut feeling.

Want to know more about Growth Marketing?