ezCloud is a Singapore-based B2B SaaS scaleup which offers property management and channel management systems for the hospitality and entertainment industry in South East Asia.
Started in 2013, raised 3 rounds of funding (the last being a high 7-figure Series A round) from top investors in the region, and 2016 was one of the seedstars world competition winners.
Since the startup started growing the CEO/CMO team had been feeling more confusion on the growth channels to pursue and the difficulty to keep a fresh eagle eye view on new and improved marketing and sales activities.
In addition the challenge of entering 3 new markets in South East Asia and testing the new products and services added another layer of complexity and difficulty in prioritisation.
FFA supported ezCloud to design and execute a new growth model for their B2B SaaS solutions and the newly launched products.
The growth engine helped to focus on the most important growth levers in order to create meaningful metrics for their present investment case that was agreed with their investors, and by doing so dramatically increasing sign ups 300%+ while reducing the customer acquisition costs CAC by 70%.
“ Working with FFA has been a great learning process, which injected key best practices and systems into our organization enabling us to grow systematically and consistently in the long-term without agency support. ”
“ Working with FFA has been a great learning process, which injected key best practices and systems into our organization enabling us to grow systematically and consistently in the long-term without agency support. ”
ezCloud is a SaaS startup a suite of management products for the hospitality industry: ezFolio (4-5* Hotel management software), ezCloudhotel (Cloud-based hotel management software), ezCMS (Cloud-based channel management system).
We met the CEO of the startup Duong Nguyen at an event in which FFA was invited as a an expert advisor. We created a strong relationship during the initial activities and became a trusted advisor for the startup company in the early development stages.
ezCloud has been steadily growing and has been self-funded for the first years, until the first challenges related to growth and fundraising appeared.
When we got on board to support ezCloud with their marketing activities, we identified 5 factors to work on to help ezCloud achieve their goals:
1. Set up an omni-channel approach
It’s always useful for you to test out all possible channels to find out what is the best source for getting conversion to put your money and effort into. With our help, ezCloud was able to define several different strategies, channels and tactics: SEM (Google Adwords, and specific local SEA search engines), SMM (Facebook), Email, Forum seeding, etc.
2. Implement a tracking system to monitor customer behavior along the whole conversion funnel
Given the number of channels that ezCloud is doing their marketing activities on, the demand for a tracking system is inevitable to help ezCloud monitor simple yet important elements for their activities. As a result of that, FFA supported ezCloud in setting up Google Analytics accounts to keep track of website-related data, implementing Google Adwords remarketing code and Facebook pixel using Google Tag Manager for the purpose of doing remarketing, applying UTM parameters with predefined naming convention and setting up UTM tracking system to receive session-based information for every signup on their websites. Besides that, ezCloud also received our support in creating a dashboard and helping them to integrate those new changes in the CRM system so they could track customer conversion along the sales process.
3. Define growth KPIs/metrics (signups, CTR, CAC, etc.) and budgets
FFA walked ezCloud through the process of choosing the metrics that mattered the most to them, how ezCloud could keep track of these metrics based on the data extracted from the tracking system as well as provided weekly reports on running campaigns performances., We helped ezCloud to calculate CLTV for each customer segment allowing them to have a clear vision of how much a customer is worth and correctly allocate to marketing budgets / CAC limits to acquire a new customer.
4. Run growth experiments with A/B testing
FFA worked closely with ezCloud team on a weekly basis to:
5. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
We explored the user / customer experience and journey on the ezCloud’s websites and reviewed these on other global competitors’ website, in order to identify what elements made people drop off from certain pages and what could be improved to boost sign ups and to reduce churn and bounces.
time, ezCloud only relied on calculating performance on overall number of signups from the website and had nearly no insights about how each of their campaigns across the whole funnel were performing.
ezCloud is a SaaS startup a suite of management products for the hospitality industry: ezFolio (4-5* Hotel management software) ezCloudhotel (Cloud-based hotel management software), ezCMS (Cloud-based channel management system).
ezCloud is a SaaS startup a suite of management products for the hospitality industry.
GROWTH
The graph above shows the change in number of signups in each month 
before FFA got on board to help
ezCloud (starting from Dec 2016) and after. We achieved to reach an approximately 300% increase of signups from qualified leads, increasing and expanding the reach within the target markets.
ACQUISITION COSTS
As can be seen from the graph above, the CAC has gradually dropped since FFA started supporting ezCloud with their marketing activities. ezCloud has been able to cut down the cost to acquire a new user by 64% and keep it stable ever since.
AN INTEGRATED GROWTH TEAM
Our support was provided remotely by working with responsible personnel at ezCloud via Skype and on shared folders which enabled everyone to work together at the same time and keep track of all the works in progress. Once a week, there was a physical meeting where FFA and ezCloud sit down together to review weekly performance of all campaigns and decide what should be done next following their marketing strategy.
TOOLS
We supported ezCloud in implementing multiple tools, such as:
