Big Red Group: How Tech Aids in Driving Small Business Growth

Throughout this turbulence, Big Red Group (BRG) has been very fortunate. Our business has grown 20% to 30% a year throughout the pandemic and, with travel restrictions lifting, we’re seeing more business growth on the 2022 horizon and beyond.

Driving this trajectory has been our ongoing investments in building market trust. We wanted customers to keep aspiring to experiences over products — what we like to call less stuff, more stories — even through restrictions caused by COVID-19. Our digital voucher model has been foundational to enabling this. On Mother’s Day in the middle of state-wide lockdowns, people could still buy mum a thoughtful, local lunch experience that could be redeemed within the next five years.

This continued servicing model has contributed to our aim of raising awareness of RedBalloon and all our brands that sit alongside. Our continued marketing investments have kept our brand awareness extremely high with 75% unprompted household name recognition for our brands across Australia. 

Keeping a joint focus on trust and awareness have boosted our market preference from under 10% in FY19 to above 30% in 2022. The goal for our group was to serve an Australian customer an experience every minute. We now serve an experience every 30 seconds.

Big Red Group set itself a mission of becoming the leading ecommerce retailer in Australia and shift the way people experience life. We want to be serving an experience every second somewhere on Earth. Such a lofty goal requires us to know our customers on a deeper level while nurturing supplier relationships.

Since the beginning, we’ve kept a conscious goal to support these efforts by underpinning them with technology platforms that can help us scale great products quickly, easily and consistently. This is easier said than done. As we know, our own technology foundation has been a constant evolution in itself. Here are 5 takeaways we’ve learnt throughout Big Red Group’s technology journey.

Supporting an ecommerce business that has grown by five times in the last five years means we must be able to scale rapidly. This requires continual digital transformation of the way we operate and the digital tools we use. Managing this alongside a hybrid workforce — one that has doubled since the pandemic began — is a complex challenge for us. 

This is compounded by the technical debt we accumulate when acquiring new businesses. Monolithic software platforms that are decades old cannot deliver the experiences we need to match rising consumer expectations, especially when 80% of our transactions are now mobile-first. We know poor experiences there can significantly impact our conversion rates. 

To keep engaging with customers successfully, we needed to consolidate the technology we use across the business. This included merging all our call centre platforms into a single source, so that we could guarantee the consistent customer service that our audiences expect. On the marketing side, we brought together seven different EDM platforms over the last 3 years to enable nurture journeys that weren’t possible on legacy platforms, particularly targeting conversions on shopping cart abandonment. 

We spend significant time, effort and resources on digital transformation to create a unified technology stack that can be effectively used by our teams. We do this because it lets us guarantee quality experiences that match and exceed expectations, at scale. This is how we act out one of our key principles: customer obsession.

To create and deliver experiences that delight and convert, we needed to upgrade our data collection process. We know that consumers want more personalised experiences but are increasingly less inclined to share personal data.

Like all ecommerce retailers, we are investing in first-party data capture and assessing the best way to approach Google Tag Manager (GTM) and Google Analytics 4 (GA4) for our business. We’re also improving our data expertise within the leadership team with a Head of Data, so we can be on the front foot for acting on customer trends, a cookieless future and keeping customer privacy front of mind in everything we do. 

For us, true business intelligence comes from the ability to add and analyse different data sources easily and seamlessly. For example, during the pandemic we were able to use publicly available Google Mobility Data to project recreational retail mobility during the pandemic lockdown. Coupling this with our own on-site and CRM activity, we could start to make decisions around what the bounce back would be after state-wide lockdowns.  

Right now, we are in the process of onboarding suppliers into our own data ecosystem so we can start deriving insights that can help them and ourselves. The next step is to understand and visualise this data for effective use — both for us and our suppliers. How are they selling against their peers? What do they offer that's cheaper or more expensive than others? What does their abandonment rate look like? 

Being able to get answers to these types of questions is real data-driven intelligence. This helps your business focus on the most impactful areas towards evolving the customer journey when needed and delivering a higher quality experience.

As a business, we differentiate ourselves from the competition through our investment in building relationships with both end-customers and suppliers. We don’t just want a booking and a transaction — we want to provide services that will create a moat of deep and meaningful relationships around our business. This is impossible without empathy and understanding for your audience.

For suppliers, we know the pandemic has massively impacted our supplier community with rising inflation and cost of goods, growing wages and unpredictable seasons ahead. This is why our supply-chain management platform needs to hold much more than name and address. We seek to capture all the intimate information of those relationships with much more discipline than we ever have before. As a result, we’re able to understand and potentially alleviate the pressures they face, so we can keep a strong relationship with each supplier.

For end-customers, our customer relationship management (CRM) platform means we’re able to understand key distinctions between audiences. For us, differentiating the buyer from a redeemer is crucial to the experience we provide. A redeemer is invested in the experience and is open to different offerings and services and therefore more inclined to share information so we can serve personalised experiences. On the other hand, a buyer requires a much lighter touch. Asking buyers to create an account and log in creates enormous friction that we know negatively impacts conversion rates. 

By understanding our audiences better, we’re able to personalise every approach and experience in a way that's tailored to their needs.

There are basically four retail levers — value, intimacy, convenience and differentiation. Every retailer, whether you're an ecommerce or a physical retailer, needs to consider their position to market in each of those different areas and determine which levers they are going to compete on.

For us, it’s all about intimacy and convenience. There are very few organisations we see ourselves competing with that are willing or able to make the level of technical investment we're prepared to make to move these levers on intimacy, and we see it as an absolutely critical part of our strategy. From a convenience perspective, we’re focusing on a frictionless mobile experience.

Choose your retail levers then start implementing the technology platforms that will help you to power, measure and adapt as customer expectations evolve.

Everyone uses the words innovation and agility all the time. But what does that really mean to us as a business?

I think the number one thing we've committed to, as a business, is to fail fast. In fact, it’s one of our three core values. We would rather make 20 $50,000 mistakes than one million-dollar mistake. We do a lot of ‘do-analyse-do’ in this business and if you're not allowing yourself to fail in projects, you're probably not pushing yourself enough in a market that is innovating and changing as quickly as ours is.

Naomi Simson, Big Red Group co-founder, and I talk a lot about customer obsession — the absolutely critical success factor. For us this means both supplier and end-customer, and we've learnt that both are constantly evolving in the way they will interact and buy from us. 

In an increasingly trustless marketplace, the ability to hold a strong relationship is more important than ever, as this provides a foundation where you can continue to grow. 

If I had to do one thing really well in the next 12 months, it would be to embed customer obsession in the business. But huge trends are also coming at us, so we need to ensure we create a digital platform that allows us to genuinely evolve as we scale.