The Red Balloon Company / BalloonPlanet

The Red Balloon Company dba BalloonPlanet.com is the leading national balloon delivery and decorating e-commerce retailer in the US and Canada serving over 100 vendors with online retail sales and order management.

My role and responsibilities:

  • System administration, application development, and technical support of the custom-built multivendor e-commerce web application.
  • Hire, manage and train sales and support staff serving retail clients and vendors by phone, email, and chat.
  • Brand and digital marketing management including search engine optimization, search marketing, shopping aggregators, social media, email, display, and remarketing.
  • Financial planning, reporting, and business development

Achieved a 19% increase in conversion rates by driving modernization of a legacy web application in collaboration with contract software developers and by using quantitative and qualitative methodologies for scoping retail client and vendor needs. Methods included one-on-one interviews, screen recording analysis (Hotjar/Clarity), and A/B testing features (Google Analytics).

Achieved a 4.8/5 rating on Google Customer Reviews by assembling a fully virtual, multi-channel contact center, staffing for main hours of operation using Zendesk, Amazon Connect, and Slack. Includes experience creating custom integrations with our shopping cart to improve customer service.

Achieved a 800% ROAS on a 500k+ annual search and product marketing budget by planning, integrating tracking, and tuning performance of ad spend on Google Ads, Bing Ads, and Facebook Ads. Marketing experience includes work integrating our product feed with Google Merchant Center and Microsoft Merchant Center.

Advised executive team on overall performance of operations using business intelligence techniques (including QBO, SQL queries for reports, and action-oriented data visualization using Tableau).

Active participation in financial operations, including sales tax compliance (integrating TaxJar), PCI compliance, vendor payments, audit response, and pursuit of Covid relief funding (incl. PPP). Tackled credit card fraud with tools I developed to automate review of incoming orders.

In response to the pandemic, I lead a change in point of sale (POS) to include a Buy Online & Pickup In Store strategy which added a 13% revenue stream to retail sales for The Red Balloon Company. We changed the POS to Square and I developed a feed to add to serve products on Google Shopping, Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram.

I drove design and development of the BalloonPlanet web application which includes client-facing e-commerce application and the vendor-facing order and delivery area management application.
The shopping cart was developed using active A/B testing with live customers to determine which features would result in the best cart to conversion performance.
I achieved a high return on ad spend by combining Search Engine Optimization strategies with Google and Microsoft Ads. Auto-generated high quality landing pages that adapt with live sales and delivery area data were used to feed and amplify our search marketing to increase customers and reduce cost.