Our Thoughts

How EndemicWorld used social media to smash it’s growth targets

December 19, 2010 by Duncan Shand

A digital marketing strategy that achieved results.

Recently EndemicWorld asked us to help them with their online marketing. EndemicWorld is an online design store that features the best New Zealand designers and the products that they produce, with the requirement being they be a New Zealand company. They have a real passion about showcasing New Zealand designers and spend a lot of energy highlighting the designers and blogging about what is happening in the local design scene.

Situation

EndemicWorld had been operating for about two years and had grown a strong brand and reputation in the market. However the level of sales that they were achieving was still not strong enough to support the operation and return a profit to the founders. They had tried a lot of online marketing in the past, dabbling in search engine optimisation, pay-per-click as well as other advertising options from radio to billboard but nothing really worked. They decided they wanted help.

The Solution

We got involved with EndemicWorld for two reasons, we love what they are trying to do as a 100% New Zealand online business so we had the freedom to work with them to implement a number of initiatives where we would get instant feedback in terms of their results.

After analysing the current state of the business there were no silver bullets that would turn things around overnight. However we knew we needed to get them some results quickly. With this in mind we did three things:

1. Full Adwords Overhaul – we did a complete overhaul of their Adwords account. They had previously used Adwords but couldn’t get it to a level that was profitable. In the past they had spent lots of money, generated reasonable traffic but this failed to turn into sales. Unless you can get Adwords to convert at an acceptable level it’s just a cost unless you are using it to build awareness. Even then the objective needs to be to have the customer convert at least to a newsletter subscriber. After working with Adwords for less than a month we generated them a positive contribution from their spend. With this the Adwords spend becomes self generating.
2. Focus on Email Campaigns – Over the last two years Endemic had accumulated 4,000 people who wanted to receive information about their products regularly. We analysed how they were using this asset and we had them refocus around three things; 1. Community – engaging with the subscribers more, being more friendly/chatty, 2. Sales – focus on products that actually sell rather than featuring more eclectic items, and 3 split the database by sex – so sell to guys and girls differently. These three actions lifted the email sales by 200%
3. Facebook – Monetise Traffic – Endemic had an existing Facebook page and this had a couple of hundred fans. However we wanted to develop a social media traffic source and thought lifting the focus on Facebook, sharing their blog content there and being a little more aggressive about growing the fan base would do the trick. It did, Over four months the number of fans quadrupled and Facebook now makes up a significant proportion of traffic to the site. To monetise this traffic we found the addition of an EndemicWorld shop tab in Facebook did the trick. The tab adds a full product listing, including a search function pulled directly from your ecommerce websites database. Since launch we’ve seen an uplift of sales of more than 300% (from Facebook traffic) – pretty good we reckon.

These three activities all had a positive impact on the EndemicWorld results and after we implemented these we still wanted more. After looking at a number of options we decided to implement a campaign focused on marketing to previous visitors to remind them of their visit and create a reason to return. We targeted a banner campaign to people who had previously visited EndemicWorld but hadn’t purchased. Using the Google Content Network we displayed ads to people for 30 days after they visited. This generated an increase in sales conversion of over 50% by prompting people to return and complete a purchase.

In addition to these activities we’ve made a number of recommendations that will increase site conversion further allowing them to take advantage of sales running up to Christmas. These changes with the results achieved to date, will help them smash last years sales results.

The Results

Over the last six months the site visitors have increased by 23%, sales orders have increased by over 52% with sales value increasing by 25%. Most importantly Elliot reposts that year on year Christmas sales are strong – very strong.

“Young & Shand have a focused results based approach, proven track record, they are good sorts and waste no effort on unnecessary flashy admin”

Elliot Alexander – Endemic World

Download the EndemicWorld Social Media Case Study as a PDF.

Related Posts:

• This Week In Digital Marketing 26-30 Mar: 25% of Paid Search Share To Be From Mobile Devices, 25 Ways To Grow An Email Database, McDonalds Second Attempt At A Trending Hashtag
• This Week In Digital Marketing 10-14 Oct: What do Facebook Users Expect When They Like Your Page? 3 Tips To Use Social Media For Customer Service And What Is The Most Effective Anchor Text?
• This Week In Digital Marketing 19-23 September: Google+ Leaves Filed Trial, Nike’s Early Adoption of Social Media and 7 Tips for Optimising Facebook Pages
• This Week In Digital Marketing 15-19 Aug: Google Testing Infinite Scroll Web Results, Google+ Has It’s Mainstream Viability Questioned and 4 Social Media Lessons From A Brand Fail

Tags: case study, endemicworld, growth target

Share this post