WWW.WholesalePashminaScarves.com
The Evaluation
The client, HBC, had an existing eccommerce website for their main business, handbags, where they also sold scarves. After seeing the handbag side of the business declining during the downturn in the economy, they realized
that their scarf business was not really being affected by the downturn and surprisingly was increasing. They brought The JM3 Group in to evaluate the current site, the way HBC does business, the way they interact with customers, and the competitors to HBC’s business.
After doing research and brainstorming with the client, The JM3 Group came up with a gameplan that involved spinning off the scarf business as a seperate entity, locating a great website domain name, building a more modern and robust ecommerce site, incorporating an email newsletter marketing campaign, and designing, implementing, and actively managing a google adwords advertising campaign.
The Process
After hearing about HBC’s previous problems with flakey web developers building custom sites then refusing to support them, and the type of budget HBC was working with, it was decided that this new site would use a solid cart package that had all of the features wanted and could be customized to their specifications. The result was a clean, well organized site with some slick features, like customer accounts, multiple shipping addresses, product image zooming, customer order history, integrated shipping features, and strong seo underpininngs.
Areas The JM3 Group worked on
Web Design: We create a site with all of the features of the most modern enterprise class ecommerce sites.- Logo Design: As a wholesale company, their goal is to be a silent partner to their customers, to go along with that they wanted a nice clean font based logo along with an icon.
- Photography: Shooting a fabric product like scarves is not an easy task when you are trying to convey the quality of the fabric and the various subtle color differences. The JM3 Group brought in their professional photographer to shoot all of the product shots for the launch.
- SEO: Normally a new site can take a few weeks to a few months of complet obscurity online as google places it in their “sandbox.” Through SEO (search engine optimization) techniques we employed, we saw the site go from nowhere to page 15 within 2 days on google search, and from there to the top 5 on the front page within 1 week for the most relevent keyowrds. This led directly to new business as we saw new customers finding the site and ordering, and as a matter of fact, in the last month HBC says they have received over 60% more new orders per week than they normally do, this does not include the orders we are tracking through the paid advertising campaign.
- Google advertising: We set up an adwords account and tested various text ads to find the best click through rates. We are seeing click through rates of around 10% a week which is a huge number. We are also able to track which orders coming in are directly from the advertising campaign through analytics software. With the information the analytics software provides, we can see how much we are spending per click, and how much business each click brings un, to determine how successful the campaign is. This is powerful information
- Email marketing: We set up an email marketing campaign for HBC and trained them in best practices for dealing with email marketeering. The campaign utilizes high quality html based emails that include graphics and links. These links can be tracked to see exacty how many people are clicking, how many people are opening the email, and how many are bouncing. It also includes the ability for subscribers to automatically unsubscribe, a legal requirement under CAN-SPAM.
- Hosting: Rather than search out sitable hosting for the site, we were able to offer them a turnkey site with affordable hosting.
The Next Step
We are planning on working with HBC to integrate some social networks into the picture. As a wholesale company, they don’t benefit as much from direct marketing to the public, and this might hurt their relationship with their retailer customers, so the gameplan is to use the appropriate tools like twitter to act as a kind of quick broadcaster to all of their current customers, keeping them up to date with new product announcements and special promotions.
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