How Nomatic Navigated Measuring the Customer Journey Post iOS Updates

Nomatic, known for its cutting-edge travel products, faced the challenge of navigating the complex digital marketing world, especially amidst shifting privacy norms and consumer behaviors. Their goal was simple yet ambitious: optimize marketing strategies to enhance customer acquisition and retention, while maintaining efficiency in spending.

Enter Rockerbox, with our sophisticated data platform designed to empower marketers with comprehensive insights to help them make data-driven business decisions, we were uniquely positioned to assist Nomatic in better understanding their marketing performance, test new channels, and scale more effective campaigns.

The Challenge

Nomatic faced significant challenges in tracking the effectiveness of various marketing channels, especially in light of privacy updates like iOS 14.5. This led to difficulties in understanding the customer journey and allocating marketing resources efficiently.

Rockerbox Solution

Rockerbox's solution was pivotal in transforming Nomatic's approach. Nate Benner, Director of Growth at Nomatic, highlighted the importance of Rockerbox's path to conversion tracking in helping them test new channels and determine channel effectiveness:

“I think the path to conversion tracking was super helpful whenever we add in a new channel. It's always interesting to see how adding a new channel impacts some of the other things that we're already doing. We want to be consistent with our hypothesis of wanting this to be a new customer acquisition channel for us, for instance with CTV and linear tv. We want to make sure that we understand if this is a first touch marketing touch point for us, and then we want to see if it is profitable for us after all. Then we want to ask ourselves what about the subsequent marketing touch points? And is this going to be scalable? And then leaning into it by saying ‘let's audit the most profitable path to conversion,’ then try to personalize that experience in a big way.”

Leveraging Rockerbox and the data provided by Rockerbox’s Collect and Track was crucial in validating results and understanding the impact of new channels on Nomatic’s overall marketing ecosystem. This facilitated informed decision-making, particularly when scaling up certain marketing channels.

Metrics

• Return on Investment: 27% increase in ROAS since starting to work with Rockerbox
• New Channel Testing: Scaled into 4 offline channels since working with Rockerbox (TV, OTT, DM, Streaming Audio)
  • Leveraged heavily during seasonal “heavy ups,” these new channels introduced 21% of new customers to the brand (first touch for new customers)(Q4 2023)
  • Introducing these channels allows for greater scale.  Nomatic can now reach customers they couldn't previously by scaling their always-on channels like Facebook (Meta), Google, and Native.
• Cost Savings: Nomatic saved over $200,000 in marketing spend by using Rockerbox's insights.
• Efficiency in Path-to-Purchase: The integration of Rockerbox products led to a more efficient conversion path.
• New Customer Acquisition: There was a noticeable improvement in acquiring new customers through optimized channel utilization.

Products Leveraged

Nomatic utilized a suite of Rockerbox products:

• Rockerbox Collect & Track: Provided comprehensive data on marketing channel effectiveness.
• Rockerbox Optimize: Enabled Nomatic to refine marketing strategies based on actionable insights.
• Rockerbox Journey: Aided in understanding the customer journey + optimizing channel performance.

By implementing Rockerbox's suite of products, Nomatic significantly improved their marketing strategies. This improvement was not just in cost savings but also in gaining a deeper understanding of their customer acquisition channels, as Nate notes, "We looked at a couple of different placements that some of our brand partners had seen some success with. So we looked at direct mail and then CTV and linear TV … we wanted to kind of utilize some of those savings into testing these new channels.”

Granular Use Case: Holiday Planning

Nomatic leveraged Rockerbox to guide their strategic decision-making around digital marketing and customer acquisition during the crucial holiday selling season. In 2022, with the backdrop of significant privacy changes like iOS 14.5, Nomatic focused on enhancing its marketing efficiency and exploring new channels. The team leaned heavily on Rockerbox's insights to navigate these changes and optimize their marketing strategy. Recognizing the need for adaptability in forecasting from 2021 to 2022, Nomatic prioritized learnings from the previous holiday season to scale up effective strategies for 2023​​.

A key strategy was to shift focus from primarily pay-per-click (PPC) advertising to incorporating traditional media tactics, allowing more lead time for consumers to plan their holiday shopping. This change was driven by an observation of increased consumer sensitivity to sales periods and resistance during non-selling periods, compounded by a crowded market of companies pushing heavy discounts year-round​​. Nomatic also refined their retargeting tactics, aligning them with television creative and adding additional value propositions and offers to maintain customer engagement throughout the holiday season​​.

“With the help of Rockerbox data, we increased gross sales 45% year over year … ,” Nate said. “Shopify gross ROAS improved about 22% year over year, and then we had a 15% increase in new customers year over year for that whole year. So we were pretty happy about the overall results. I think we did a lot of things right. And looking forward into this [2023 holiday season], we have a much stronger understanding. We've been with Rockerbox a year and a half, so we have a pretty strong baseline of what these channels have done for us historically. So o[our focus now is] just making sure that we're using the data that we have available.”

Nomatic's use of Rockerbox was crucial in discerning the actual return on ad spend (ROAS) across different platforms, especially during high-spending periods like the holidays. This insight helped them avoid over-investment in channels with inflated ROAS, ensuring more efficient allocation of their marketing budget​​. The focus was not just on reducing costs but also on acquiring new customers, using channels like direct mail, connected TV, and linear TV to reach new audiences and support existing channels that were facing challenges​​.

Interested in seeing how Rockerbox can help set your company up for data-driven success? Schedule a demo today.