This was one of the most interesting points of the speech. Just Eat initially thought that their ideal customer base was students. They spent lots of marketing £ targeting specific locations and demographics towards their “perfect customer” because they THOUGHT that students loved the convenience of online ordering.

Shortly after the marketing campaigns commenced Ash conducted real-time customer interviews to deduce how well their perfect customer base was responding to the service – with phone interviews. (There are numerous ways to do this, incentivised email marketing always works well when conducting customer feedback).

After a short conversation with a customer, who happened live above and order from his local takeaway twice a week (yes – seriously) it transpired that the customer was an avid online gamer.

When asked why he chose to order from the takeaway downstairs his response was “I play online games for a living. I spend a lot of time at the console and there are few breaks between matches”.  

So, it turned out that students were not the ideal customer. The early adopters of the service were online gamers. Who would have thought?

Even big companies get it wrong. Every business has to start somewhere. The key to exceptional growth is defining, testing and redefining who EXACTLY your ideal customer is!

Just Eat poured mountains of time into SEO, and paid search to the extent where they monopolised the search results.

They even went as far as creating an individual website for every take away that signed up with them – to be penalised by Google. So how did their strategy change?

Instead of creating individual websites for new takeaways, Just Eat created a review API (software) that automatically pushed reviews left on the Just Eat website to Google reviews, allowing them to continue their SERP (search engine results) domination without penalisation.

Two primary advantages of this were SEO domination and social proofing. Reviews from real customers made the decision-making process for potential customers a lot easier than taking a shot in the dark with a takeaway they’ve never eaten from before.

Just Eat struck affiliate deals with Yellow Pages online. They put a call to action – link beside the takeaways telephone numbers saying order online, producing a mind-boggling 60% conversion rate. Just Eat knew their customers went online for food info and they nailed it. This worked so well because Just Eat shared the same journey with Yellow pages, enabling them to maximise online ordering channels.

The key is to start at home. Go where your customers go and you’ll find success.

Just because Just Eat is an online company didn’t mean traditional tactics couldn’t work. They bridged the gap between traditional and digital with a very useful technique.

Just Eat struck another affiliate deal with their clients (takeaways) and flyer printing company. They gave each business 2.2 (average) printed logos that were to be stuck in shop windows to promote customers to order online.

The results? … 50% of their customers came from window stickers!

The most important thing for all businesses, big and small – knowing your numbers.

Ensure the skills exist within an organisation. Understand qualitative and quantitative metrics and KPI’s. Find your core metrics and “North Star” metrics. Avoid vanity metrics and concentrate on the important metrics like customer lifetime value, monthly recurring revenue conversion rate.

Having a growth culture is the key to improvement. Just Eats team learned to work together, embrace change and overcome obstacles as a unit.
No Man Is An Island.

Just because something didn’t work doesn’t mean it’s failed. Analyse, tweak and re-implement and be open to new challenges and ideas – ALWAYS!