1and1

CHALLENGE

Grow online business in Europe & North America, maximise customer acquisition & retention.

1&1 Internet AG known today as Ionos is a leading global German player in the area of web hosting and cloud solutions. It provides solutions to individuals and SMEs for building, running and developing their web presence and ecommerce.
I was leading the international product marketing teams distributed across North America and Europe. We optimised the efficiency of large ecommerce websites, ran and analysed on a daily basis complex and ongoing campaigns for customer acquisition and launched many SaaS products.

A major challenge in that industry is to grow and retain the customer base. It takes hard work, smart strategies and analysis, and agile drive to get the attention and consideration, to convert visitors into customers and retain them.
Another main challenge is the multicultural dimension, on the customer front, and in managing the teams: in such a quick realtime business, cultural misunderstandings are constant challenges in the quick decision making that is needed.
Last but not least the level of data and complexity to analyse fast and constantly and keep ahead in that business is huge.

SOLUTION

Run always-on testing campaigns and website scenarios, analyse smart, variate experiences across countries & categories, constantly share, challenge, and celebrate findings.

A main factor to scale business in that kind of web industry is about running permanent experiences, making hypotheses, validating and invalidating, rapidly closing what doesn’t work, iterating what works better. In more details, it’s about running multivariate testing and cohort analyses across regions and product categories, comparing outcomes and iterating from there. It takes the continuous drive of testing campaigns that you run continuously and analyse intensively on a very short time frame, to rapidly close fails and iterate wins : scaling is about smart analysis and quick agile iterations.
In terms of team management, it takes continuous open sharing of the experimentations and outcomes, where team members challenge each other in their findings, and celebrate together not only the wins but also the fails. Campaign fails are indeed good news: they help close doors to refocus efforts and iterate in further directions.