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The Tool Store Canada is a family-owned hardware store selling high-quality woodworking tools in Canada. They were initially a physical store only, but COVID-19 forced them to focus more on online sales.

What the Objective Was

The Tool Store Canada reached out to Thinkplus to help them scale their online sales. Their business target was to double total (including offline) monthly sales from CA$100,000 to CA$200,000, with online contributing at least a quarter of this.

Given their small budget, we set ourselves an aggressive PPC target of hitting CA$20,000 per month within six months. When we took on the PPC management (in August 2021), their website was generating CA$17,600 of monthly revenue, with PPC contributing just CA$3000 of this.

How We Achieved It

The Package

Our client started on a medium-sized marketing campaign including Google Ads, Conversion Rate Optimisation and Email Marketing.

The Strategy

Due to a restricted ad spend and limited product range, we established that the only traffic we could really target was highly commercial product-focused searchers and branded traffic. As much as we’d love to target top-of-funnel traffic, provide DIY downloadable guides etc., with the budget available, we knew we needed to be precise and commercially focused on fast ROI.

Shopping campaigns were central to our strategy as we could show searchers the SKUs in stock and price-qualify anyone clicking (thus preserving precious budget). Budget constraints showed us that we needed our shopping campaigns to have incredibly tight product targeting — and target the highest converting products from the offset.

We also opted to provide support with email marketing to increase the client’s customer lifetime value. This was a marketing channel the client wasn’t utilising at all and one we believed would be highly impactful for the campaign.

The Results

Within four months, we had more than tripled total website sales to CA$54 thousand per month. PPC contributed CA$27.7 thousand per month from an ad spend of CA$1,691. This graph shows the month we took over (their campaigns still running while we got ourselves set up) vs month four in November 2021:

In the same period, we reduced the CPA from CA$189.79 to CA$23.56 and achieved a ROAS of 1583% and a total ROI of 110.44%.

This graph shows the website’s revenue increase from when we launched the advertising campaigns on Google Ads for this client in August 2021. It took us approximately three months of running live ads to start seeing significant growth. This is as expected with businesses beginning to advertise on Google for the first time, as there is no historical data to work from.

During month one, Google is acquiring the data we need to make informed decisions when optimising ads. In month two, we are making data-driven decisions and changes to the campaign. In month three, the impact of our data-gathering and optimisations starts to be seen as campaigns gain traction and perform better. We expect to see an even larger increase moving forward with campaign optimisations and testing different bidding strategies and campaign types.

During the first six weeks of the email campaign, email marketing achieved an excellent 41% average open rate and 1.46% conversion rate. This generated CA$3,624.30 (12 conversions), of which CA$757.68 (four conversions) were assisted conversions. We expect to see results continue to improve over time.

The post 208% Revenue Increase in 5 Months for The Tool Store Canada appeared first on Thinkplus.

Our client is a traditional producer of dairy-based food products that wanted to move online. They had a strong local following and well-regarded products, but lacked online presence.

Our Objective

Our client had initially been hesitant to invest in digital marketing, having grown the business offline. However, by 2021, they realised that they needed to establish their online presence to reach a wider audience than just their local area.

Our client had a new website built to spearhead this new initiative… but unfortunately, they asked someone else to build their site. This meant that their brand new website managed to start life looking dated and, to make matters worse, it was riddled with spelling mistakes. It was a low-cost website and this showed in all the wrong ways.

How We Achieved It

The Package

The client started with a medium-sized campaign with both SEO and Content Marketing services. We diverted a fair number of our Content Marketing actions into copywriting to fix the spelling mistakes on the key pages. This might not seem like a marketing activity, but spelling mistakes shred credibility and make potential buyers worry about the legitimacy of a business, so it’s an important thing to get right.

The Strategy

With the most glaring spelling mistakes fixed, we moved on to the SEO phase of the campaign. The first step would be to find the keywords used by potential buyers when they searched for our client’s products on the internet. We analysed these potential keywords and chose the most appropriate terms based on how difficult each keyword would be to rank for and how many potential visitors we’d bring to the site.

Armed with our target keywords, we optimised key pages across the site for these terms. This meant not only quick fixes to page titles and meta descriptions, but looking at the copy across the board, paying particular attention to headers and any CTA buttons. At the same time, we crawled the site for technical errors (of which there were plenty) and tidied up the site’s linking structure and backlink profile.

Once we’d completed our initial SEO tasks, we moved to Content Marketing. Our efforts were split between three main areas: adding persuasive sales copy to important pages, adding informational content to the blog, and getting our client’s business and products featured on sites across the internet to raise awareness.

The Results

After nine months of our marketing campaign, we achieved a 544% increase in website visitors through search and a whopping 1750% increase in revenue generated through the website. We managed this by maintaining the average order value and improving the website’s conversion rate while simultaneously sending more visitors to the website.

The post 1,750% Increase in Online Revenue for a B2C Food Business appeared first on Thinkplus.

Our client sells gorgeous upmarket baby clothes in New Zealand. They have a dedicated following in New Zealand and Australia. Still, those dedicated followers could be critical of releases that didn’t meet their expectations, as customers have every right to be and so the branding, tone and marketing messages are highly important for their business.

Our Objective

Our client’s main objective is to break into the UK and US markets whilst maintaining their decent growth rate in New Zealand and Australia. As fashion moves so quickly, they needed a fast and responsive marketing agency that could keep up with a continuously changing landscape. They also needed an agency that could understand the precise positioning of their brand, something that’s always important in marketing but crucial in fashion.

How We Achieved It

The Package

Our client is an established, sizeable business with international ambitions. That means they need a large, multichannel marketing campaign to stay ahead of the competition. We started with a large-scale marketing campaign that included SEO, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Email Marketing, PPC, Paid Social, and Web Development and Design. One key advantage of getting all these services through a single agency like Thinkplus is that you can be sure the different channels are working together towards a shared goal.

The Strategy

To start with, we scoured our client’s site for easy SEO, and Website Development wins. We focused on fixing technical errors and identifying any poor experiences for the users that might block a sale. Potential buyers have high standards. If it’s not easy to buy through your website, users will hit that back button and jump over to competitor websites in the blink of an eye.

With the site cleaned up, we moved on to the Content Marketing and Influencer Marketing phase. We wanted the client’s website to be a place that readers would enjoy even when not shopping for new clothes. We created a content hub packed with information and fun articles that our target audience would enjoy with that in mind. The content we create is themed to match new releases. To break into the UK and US markets, we worked hard to build up a list of influencers who would share images and videos of the clothes being worn on their platform.

Last but not least, we worked tirelessly on an Email Marketing campaign to promote key marketing events such as Black Friday and Christmas. As is best practice, we divided our email readers into distinct groups or segments and wrote emails specifically for their needs. This is a great way to improve the open rate and ensure that emails don’t end up in the dreaded spam folder. We also went hard on marking sure that our emails were visually appealing, given the importance of strong visuals in this market.

The Results

As a result of our work, our client had an exceptionally strong Black Friday and Christmas season. Over Black Friday and Cyber Monday, our client earned $350,000 from 3,859 email marketing sales. In fact, email readers were converting at a super high rate of 8.59%. This ended up beating the previous year’s Black Friday email marketing campaign by an impressive 375%.

In the image above, you can see our email marketing campaign (blue) compared to the previous year’s (orange).

Over the same period, we also saw a vast improvement in site visitors through search engines. We saw a stunning 124.4% increase in organic traffic in just the first three months of our campaign. At the same time, our influencer campaigns helped drive referral traffic and traffic through social media.

At the same time that we were bringing more people to our client’s site, we also managed to improve the rate at which people on the site made purchases. Our client’s site was already converting at a respectable 4.48% when we started work. However, thanks to the hard work of our Dev Team, we were able to spot a few places where we could improve the user’s experience. This resulted in an 8.67% improvement in conversion rate, which is more significant when you consider the extra people on the website.

The post Email Marketing Earned our Client’s Fashion Site $350,000 on Black Friday appeared first on Thinkplus.

Our client is an eCommerce business based in Australia. They sell a range of perfumes and fragrances, both in Australia and internationally. They stock a wide range of products from many different brands.

Our Objective

Our client’s main aim was to increase the revenue generated from their website. In the month before they joined us, they earned $46,000. They realised that digital marketing could help their website take the next step and power business growth.

One particular area for improvement was the number of site visitors they got each month through search engines like Google. In the month before we started our marketing work, this number was just 25,700, but they thought that their business had the potential to reach a wider audience.

How We Achieved It

The Package

Our client started with a medium-sized, multi-channel marketing campaign, including SEO and Content Marketing. We also decided to invest time into an Email Marketing campaign, as we felt there was a lot of potential for success in this market. A dedicated Project Manager coordinated the whole effort.

The Strategy

For the SEO and Content Marketing side, we set out to optimise the client’s website. The SEO team researched a set of target keywords and assigned a keyword to the most important pages on the client’s website. The SEO Team also implemented schema, which allowed us to shape how our client’s website was presented in search engines. The Content team worked hard to improve the sales copy across the site, as well as optimise existing pages and blog posts. They also created new blog content to attract new visitors.

At the same time, the Email Marketing team realised that they’d have to provide useful and interesting content about perfumes and fragrances to reach the target audience. They used copy and imagery to provoke an emotional response in readers and timed emails around events and holidays to encourage gift purchases.

To get the best results from the email campaign, the Email Marketing team divided the client’s subscribers into segments. This meant that subscribers would only receive emails appropriate to their interests and needs, rather than getting blanket emails aimed at all possible buyers.

The Results

We tracked results through the client’s website and were incredibly pleased with the progress. The month before we started work, the client’s website generated $46,000. Through email marketing alone, we generated $230,000 in just five months. By the end of the campaign, the client’s website generated $74,000 per month — a revenue increase of 61%. Over the same period, we improved organic traffic from 25,700 to 51,400 per month.

One of the key factors to our success was segmentation. We prioritised engaged contacts — people who enjoyed opening and reading our emails. By focusing on engaged readers, we achieved really strong open rates and deliverability scores. This, in turn, meant that fewer of our emails were flagged as spam by email providers, so more of our marketing emails got through to potential customers.

To understand what segmentation can mean for a campaign, it’s worth putting those numbers into context. An average email marketing campaign for an eCommerce website has an open rate of around 15.68% and a click-through rate of 2.01%. That means most emails aren’t being read, let alone acted on. Every email newsletter we wrote for our client blew these stats out of the water! The lowest open rate in our early emails was 26%, but we ended up averaging a 35% to 51% open rate. That’s more than three times the average for our best emails.

Thankfully, readers weren’t just opening our emails — they were buying products too. One of the advantages of email marketing is that it can generate sales relatively quickly compared to other marketing channels that take time to build up. In month two of the campaign, we earned our client 173 orders through email marketing, totalling $30,400. In month three, we topped that and earned 186 orders at $31,300.

The post $230,000 from Email Marketing for an eCommerce Business in 5 Months appeared first on Thinkplus.

2020 was a strange year for many and saw plenty of businesses move their focus online. North Star Models was one such business. Until the first lockdown, Matt — the owner of North Star — had run a thriving business, mainly through attending trade shows. But when trade shows were no longer an option, North Star needed an eCommerce website to showcase some of their unique models.

As a child, Matt’s grandfather took him to a model store. Since then, it had long been his dream to own a store of his own. A model aficionado himself, Matt could offer something that some of his larger competitors couldn’t — a genuine enthusiasm for model collecting and true expertise. This kind of unique selling point (USP) is a gift when creating an online presence, particularly when trying to compete with large stores with competitive prices.

However, Matt’s existing website just wasn’t converting, and he was continuing to do much of his trade via eBay. He approached Thinkplus to build him a lead generation website that gave his business a professional look but still had Matt’s friendly, approachable tone of voice. Most importantly, the site needed to convert website visitors into paying customers.

The Objective

• Better User Journey — As a small business owner looking to simplify his purchasing process, it was important to create a website for Matt that took on all the principles of a great user experience to drive conversions.
• Easy ways for customers to get in touch — Matt’s customer base would sometimes try to barter on price. Also, as he supplied specialist products, they occasionally asked Matt to source them a particular model. So while we were looking to make the buying process as easy as possible for potential customers, it was also essential to maintain Matt’s personal approach to selling models by keeping avenues of contact open.
• Easy for the client to update with new products — North Star Models has a constantly evolving stock as models sell out and new limited editions are released. Being an expert in the field, Matt’s product descriptions are second to none and are a big part of what makes North Star unique, so we needed to provide Matt with a website that he could easily update with his new offerings. Whichever template we picked needed to be slick and simple to use.

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How We Achieved It

The Strategy

The categories on the original North Star Models site made sense to real model experts — but we needed the website to be accessible to all. So one of our first ports of call was to create a clear and easy way to navigate the website’s structure based on tried and tested conversion rate optimisation principles. Using our questionnaire and a kick-off call, our Development Project Manager got to know the client and their product and made recommendations to make the website easy to understand for any model user — from the novice to the pro. We suggested streamlining categories into just five, from an original twelve, to ease user flow.

In terms of their price points, North Star had some fierce competition from huge model companies. Our copy needed to make it crystal clear that the added value of buying from North Star was Matt himself. So, we placed Matt’s incredible backstory front and centre of all of our storytelling. In the meantime, our ingenious SEO team helped ensure the site’s copy was fully optimised for Google by using the most relevant keywords.

Finally, we selected a clean and user-friendly WordPress template that we know to be conversion-friendly and would work well for Matt’s brand.

The Package

Matt signed up for a lead generation website based on a template. It was an eCommerce website, so users needed to be able to buy products through the website. Thinkplus’s templated websites use the conversion rate optimisation principles that we have developed by selecting the highest converting elements from our best performing websites over the years. Though elements of the website are templated, the site’s colours, images and search engine optimised content are all bespoke to the client.

The Results

North Star now has a website that can compete with Matt’s competitors in terms of appearance and user journey. Products are displayed beautifully, and each product page converts — with the “Buy” button above the fold and Matt’s wonderful descriptions in plain sight.

Playing to Matt’s strength of giving personal, expert advice certainly seemed to work. Matt’s old website was never his primary mode of attracting business, but following the launch of the new site, North Star Models had many more enquiries via the site-wide contact forms.

It’s still early days for this site, but over the past month, site traffic has been steadily climbing. We’re excited to see which new models appear next!

The post Conversion-increasing Redesign for Large eCommerce Store appeared first on Thinkplus.

This eCommerce business sells indoor and outdoor wall lights to consumers. The owner had been running Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search and Shopping campaigns to very little success, achieving an average Cost per Acquisition (CPA) of £76.04. Frustrated with the lack of progress, they contacted the Ninjas.

2. Objective

Our objective was to increase sales and improve the average CPA across the Paid Search and Shopping campaigns.

3. Strategy

The original PPC Search campaign was set to target a large number of their products. This can be a common approach in self-managed campaigns, because the thinking goes that increasing the number of products advertised will increase the total sales. However, this is rarely the case unless the business has a huge budget.

With very little targeted focus, this ‘spread it thin’ approach was costing the business a considerable amount on unprofitable products and audiences.

When we took over the PPC account, our priority was to narrow down the targeting to top-level keywords and focus on the broader terms that the Shopping campaign may not pick up on. We re-wrote the ads for the PPC campaign using the new extended format (which allows us to provide more USPs and information to compel the user to click) and made sure that we had implemented the relevant ad extensions.

The Google Shopping campaign was previously set up to promote all products on the website. With a limited budget, this led to the client quickly reaching their maximum spend each day, and meant they were missing out on vital conversions for their best-performing products. We segmented the products into relevant product groups and focused only on promoting the bestsellers, and those with the highest ROI. We also adjusted the bids to ensure that the bestselling product group ads would be more visible in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) space.

Using the historical data gathered from the old campaigns, we set up an ad schedule to ensure that we were bidding more during times that had previously led to the highest volume of sales. This also allowed us to preserve our daily budget and spend as little as possible during other times, which avoided the previous situation of the ads not being shown due to a lack of budget.

4. Package

The client was on a 2 Action PPC (Search) and Shopping Campaign package.

5. Results

The results of changes we made to the campaign were astonishing. After just one month, sales had increased by 63.25%, while the average CPA had dropped by 54.1%. This was the highest level of continual sales the company had seen during their history of running Paid Search campaigns, and it also meant that they achieved a positive ROI after just one month of our management.

Whilst it’s rare to achieve such phenomenal growth in just the first month of the campaign, it does illustrate the amount of low-hanging fruit that can be picked up in self-managed Google PPC campaigns by an experienced professional PPC manager.

The post eCommerce Sales Increased by 63.25%. Cost per Sale Down 54.1% appeared first on Thinkplus.

Our client sells e-cigarettes in the US through an online store. In his own words, the client told us that he was taking a “final punt” on the website by investing in marketing. In the month that we started working with the client, the website only made $468 in sales. He needed us to help turn the business around, otherwise, he’d have to shut up shop.

2. Objective

Due to regulations, e-cigarette websites can’t promote themselves through PPC advertising or ads on social media. This meant that the client depended on his customers finding his website through Google searches. Fortunately, helping businesses get found by customers is exactly what we do!

Caption: the graph above shows how our client’s sales grew over the first twelve months of the campaign. Note that other than some signs of life, things didn’t get moving until a good nine months in.

3. Strategy

We took two main approaches to help our client earn more customers. First, we decided to improve our client’s website by fixing various issues and smoothing out any rough edges. Once we were happy with our on-site work, we worked on getting our client’s business featured in several key websites.

• We started by researching a list of keywords. For our client, these are phrases that potential customers put into Google or other search engines when they want to buy e-cigarettes online.
• We edited our client’s page titles and meta descriptions. These snippets are the ones you’ll see after you press “enter” on a Google search that give searchers more information about a website. If you improve these snippets, you’ll earn more traffic.
• To help visitors get around our client’s website, we improved the links between the different pages on the website. Customers won’t buy from your website if they can’t get around easily!
• We started publishing blog content on our client’s site once a week. The blog content covered the latest developments in e-cigarettes and compared the risks of smoking versus the risks of using e-cigarettes.
• To help potential customers make the right purchase, we also created in-depth product guides that compared different brands of e-cigarettes. These guides proved very popular and they are often the first thing you’ll find in Google if you search for information about a particular type of e-cigarette!
• We started writing about e-cigarettes on several different websites. At one point we had a regular column in one of the industry’s top websites. Our writing was never too promotional — we always tried to provide value to our readers and this helped us build a loyal following.
• Early on, we were able to run several competitions with an expensive e-cigarette kit as the top prize. One of these competitions attracted 30,000 entries at a point when the client’s business was still relatively small. This helped kickstart their following on social media and paved the way for further growth.

Caption: sales have grown steadily throughout the campaign! Please don’t panic about the drop in the graph towards the end! This was a tracking code issue, not a sales issue.

4. Package

Our client started on a medium-sized package, but they were keen to increase their marketing budget when they saw that they were making a massive return on their investment. The website saw improvements within the first three months, but it wasn’t until twelve months later that growth took off. At this point, they doubled their package size and became Thinkplus’s largest client.

5. Results

If we compare our client’s best-ever month for sales with the figures for when we started work, the results are simply exceptional.

• We increased the total number of monthly visitors to the client’s website by 42,720%.
• We increased the number of people coming to the client’s site through Google searches by 65,469%.
• We increased monthly sales by 622,316%.

It’s worth saying again that this growth happened without any other form of paid advertising.

The post Taking a US eCommerce Website from $463 Monthly Sales to $3.03 Million! appeared first on Thinkplus.

Our client sells e-cigarettes to customers in the UK. They don’t have a physical store — all sales come through their website. When we started working together, the business was already doing well by the standards of a small business. But they decided to take some of their profits and invest them by increasing their online marketing spend. That proved to be a wise investment.

We started work in October and in the first full year, we increased sales by 56.47%, from £230,000 to £356,000 per month. In the second year, sales increased by a further 41.63% to just over £500,000. This year, the company had another record sales year, doing a cool £670,000 each month.

Caption: the graph above shows how sales increased for our client in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

2. Objective

Our client had taught himself the basics of online marketing and made many smart marketing decisions. But he’d reached a point in his business where his time was needed elsewhere. We came on board to take over every aspect of his website’s online marketing, so he could focus on running his business.

3. Strategy

As e-cigarettes are regulated, we couldn’t rely on PPC advertising or paid advertising on social media. We looked at our client’s website and saw we had a decent chance at success. The business had a good range of products and sold them at reasonable prices with free shipping available on larger orders. Visitors who came to the website were converting, so we could see the business had potential.

In the first year, we managed to increase the number of people coming to our client’s site through Google searches by 75.82%, by splitting our efforts between two goals. The first was to improve the client’s website and get it ready to handle more visitors. The second goal was to make sure that when potential customers typed “buy e-cigarettes online” into Google, our client’s website came up as one of the first options.

• We looked at the words and phrases used by potential customers when they searched for e-cigarettes online. We improved our client’s website by making sure it used the language of their customers.
• We wanted potential customers to visit our client’s website rather than any of their competitors. To this end, we edited our client’s page titles and meta descriptions to make them more appealing to searchers.
• Internal links — the links on a website to other pages on the same site — help potential customers to easily move between the different parts of the site. We reviewed and improved the internal links on our client’s website.
• New blog content on a website can attract more visitors. The content must be highly relevant — otherwise, your visitors won’t become customers. We started publishing blog content once a week, covering the latest developments in e-cigarettes and compared the risks of smoking versus the risks of using e-cigarettes.
• We discovered many potential customers were overwhelmed by the number of products available on our client’s website. To help new customers make the right purchase, we created in-depth product guides that compared different brands of e-cigarettes. These guides varied in complexity, depending on whether they focused on new or returning customers.
• By positioning our client’s brand as a trustworthy source of information for e-cigarette enthusiasts, we grew business significantly. We did this by writing about e-cigarettes on several different websites. We even secured a regular column in one of the industry’s top websites.

Caption: the graph above shows the total number of visitors coming to our client’s website growing over time.

4. Package

Our client started on a medium-sized package and upgraded to one of our largest packages when we showed them they were making a return on their investment. We’ve been working together for over three years and the site is more visible — and successful — than ever.

5. Results

• We increased the number of monthly visitors on our client’s website by 110%.
• We increased the number of visitors coming to our client’s website via Google searches in the first year by 75.82%.
• We grew monthly sales from £230k per month to £680k per month.

Caption: the graph above shows how often our client’s website is visible to people making searches on Google and other search engines. Note the turbulence around Google’s Medic update. However, we came out stronger than before.

Our client is extremely pleased with the results. His website has increased sales year-on-year, making a massive return on his original marketing budget. He’s rightfully proud of the progress his business has made.

The post Our Client Increased Their Sales from £230k a Month to £680k. appeared first on Thinkplus.