Built For A Data-Driven World: How My Muscle Chef Is Thriving In 2021

As a business that was only started in 2013, My Muscle Chef has been able to leverage the power of data-driven advertising throughout its entire lifespan.

And while digital advertising has come a long way over the past eight years, as the company’s Chief Technology Officer Nishant Menon explained, it has been important to ensure My Muscle Chef’s data has evolved with the rest of the industry.

“My Muscle Chef was born on the internet. Our first advertising investment, like many startups, was to buy performance Facebook ads, followed by Google Search. Whilst attribution in those days was very last-click focussed, we have always been driven by performance outcomes.

“We’ve been able to successfully accelerate our performance marketing to be more data-driven, leveraging the deeper insights into our customers and their value to our business. These insights enable us to become better at acquiring a variety of loyal, long-term customers by tailoring our brand proposition, product offering and messaging to meet and support their needs.”

My Muscle Chef collects user data via on-site analytics, polls and surveys to measure customer sentiment, behaviours and trends, explained Menon.

These insights not only help My Muscle Chef build better relationships with its customers, but they also help ensure all ads are performing as well as they possibly can.

“The interesting thing is that the tools we use – primarily from Google and Facebook – to acquire customers profitably are available to every advertiser on the planet. The differentiator, however, is how you use those tools: specifically the data you feed them, your measurement foundations and the data-driven optimisation of creative, to maximise business results,” Menon said.

“Google and Facebook are essentially outcome machines in our broader framework of tools we utilise to scale and grow beyond a $250m business.”

Keeping the cart full

Ecommerce businesses use a variety of different metrics to measure engagement throughout the customer journey.

One metric that Menon and the My Muscle Chef team find particularly useful is cart abandonment.

“It’s pretty simple: if you only get people to the shopping cart and not to complete the purchase, it impedes the effort and investment in marketing, acquisition, content, customer engagement, UX and technology – the digital equivalent of window shopping,” he said.

“As Australia’s functional food and beverage leader, My Muscle Chef is here to sell our range to customers online. Therefore, the fewer customers that drop out of your shopping cart without purchasing, the better.”

Talking about UX and cart abandonment is one thing, but actually putting structures in place to reduce it is another.

Menon revealed just how much effort has gone into keeping this figure down for My Muscle Chef.

“We have worked to reduce cart abandonment and increase conversion rates by introducing a cross functional conversion rate optimisation working group, made up of our UX, data & analytics, marketing and engineering teams, who work together to design and implement small experiments on a rolling two weekly basis,” he said.

“We review the data and results from each experiment every two weeks and implement successful changes based on successful results.”

He also described optimising the UX as a “process of lots of little wins”, where the team experiments to see how minor changes can have an impact.

Improving customer experience is a continual process. Menon explained how utilising certain technologies is helping My Muscle Chef stay ahead.

“Leveraging technologies like Salesforce and Google Cloud, through methodologies such as A/B testing, we’ve successfully built out models and datasets that feed into our API product to continually improve customer experience and increase e-commerce conversion rates by over 50 per cent,” he said.

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