It might have worked in the eighties blockbuster ‘Field of Dreams,’ but the saying “if you build it they will come” certainly does not apply to ecommerce or retail.
Marketers today spend millions to billions of dollars on marketing and advertising, in an effort to capture the consumer's attention.
From store launches, to holiday planning, to one-off campaigns, clients are always hungry to creatively showcase their brand. However, devising and executing an innovative marketing strategy is not always an easy task. There are a lot of moving parts, which can include dreaming up the design concept, planning live events, and creating a digital marketing plan with a content marketing, email, paid, or social media strategy.
But many moving parts can lead to many lessons learned. With this in mind, we reached out to our community, and asked them to share some insight on a marketing project they’ve worked on recently. May they help inspire your next campaign!
You might also like: Why Every Shopify Store Needs a Marketing & Sales Funnel.
1. RêveBoutique by Original Design Studio
"We do a lot of marketing campaigns for our fashion clients, and often match the homepage of their Shopify store with their social posts and email marketing. The following example is a holiday-themed campaign we ran for RêveBoutique. Their dresses are very sexy, glam, and high-end so the campaign had to have that vibe to it. For this particular campaign, we took the images internally. With New Years Eve in mind, we decided to go with a classic black and gold theme for the graphics and images. We drew a lot of inspiration from Vogue.”
— Gina Capozza, Principle at Original Design Studio.
2. Banded by MetaCake
“Banded Headbands is a leading national headband retailer, who many regard as making the most comfortable headband in the world. We’ve worked with them for several years to develop their direct-to-consumer ecommerce experience. We designed and built their store, and have run much of their online marketing. “Giving" is a core part of their brand. They give three meals to a child in need for every headband purchased. In fact, they even have a meal counter in the store header as well as on the cart page, which updates based on the items in the cart. Using this as inspiration, we created an awareness campaign called 1=3 which centered around the giveback message of the brand. Below are two examples of banners that we created. Banded also has a very loyal customer base with raving reviews. These client testimonials inspired a Facebook ad campaign, where we use existing product reviews in the ad images. The testimonials served as a visual trust builder, which proved to be very successful.”
— Kenneth Ott, Co-Founder, Metacake
3. Silk Laundry — Reload Media
“As part of the initial strategy to generate awareness for the Silk Laundry brand, in conjunction with Google search ads, we launched a number of Instagram and Facebook ads targeted at women aged 18 – 35 with an interest in luxury goods. We did this to reach Silk Laundry’s target audience demographic and reflect their high-end brand image. With their clothing items typically retailing upwards of $130, the inspiration was to create ads that reflected the luxury brand positioning, whilst raising awareness amongst the target audience who may not have heard of the brand previously. These ads worked in tandem with Google Search and Shopping Ads further down the purchase funnel, which, over the three month campaign window accounted for 14 per cent of all website transactions and 11 per cent of all website revenue. We also tied that in with their ‘Shop Instagram’ page.”
— Craig Somerville, Director, Reload Media
4. KOMONO — Digerati
“When we were discussing Black Friday campaigns with the client, we wanted to embrace the recognizable design aspects found in most Black Friday creatives, while visually standing out in the chaos that comes with the biggest shopping day of the year – and the day that truly kicks off the holiday season sales. In keeping with KOMONO's sleek-yet-bold branding, we generated imagery with dark and mysterious tones, while still highlighting the quality and craftsmanship of products. The challenge of Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns is that we have a very small (24-hour) window to convert prospects that every merchant is fighting for.”
— Amer Grozdanic, VP Digital Services, Digerati
5. Sklar Furnishing — Evoke Solutions
“Sklar Furnishings is a high-end furniture retailer in Boca Raton, FL. Evoke Solutions manages their digital and traditional marketing. As part of their annual strategy, Sklar’s warehouse sale appeals to a much wider demographic. The creative, messaging, and the distribution were adjusted across the integrated campaign to match the broader audience.
The campaign was highly targeted. The first release deployed two emails: a save-the-date, which had an open rate over 25 per cent, and a 23 per cent CTR (astonishingly high); and a follow-up email with a 32 per cent open rate, and a 26 per cent CTR, both driving to unique landing pages. With Sklar’s industry leading site bounce rate of 2.67 per cent, we were able to capture significant leads. In addition to email marketing, we incorporated an Adwords Search campaign, which drove a click-through rate of over 6 per cent. And finally, we used social media to ensure our loyal fans didn’t miss the opportunity. The video views were up tenfold from previous peaks on the channel.”
— Barrett Holman, Director Client Services, Evoke Solutions
You might also like: 3 Simple Ways Your Agency Can Use Content Marketing to Build a Better Brand and Find New Clients.
6. Goat Tape by The Vaan Group
“We created a marketing plan to drive more wholesale orders to the website of both standard Goat Tape, and custom Goat Tape. The flow included email marketing campaigns that led to a landing page. The landing page form, upon submission, delivered an email with a marketing deck that further explained the benefits of Goat Tape, it's athletes, and why clients should get on board. If customers were interested in custom tape, we had a custom order flow that made it interactive and easy to inquire about getting custom tape — a flow that increased operational efficiency by 90 per cent.”
— Xavier Armand, Co-Founder, Vaan Group
7. Pump Peelz — Deep Varnish
“Pump Peelz has a very active and engaged community. Leading up to the holidays, they wanted to create more opportunities to have conversations and personal connections with their customer base. Using Facebook Live, they gave their audience a peek behind the curtain, and answered questions as they packaged and shipped orders.
We also did a “12 days of Christmas” giveaway, where Pump Peelz worked with industry partners to donate gifts. Unlike many other traditional giveaways, one of the key aspects of the campaign was tied to the idea of the season of giving. Instead of just giving something away to a commenter, Pump Peelz asked followers to tag someone they would gift the prize to, which led to a lot of really great comments and community engagement.
Finally, to increase brand awareness and reach more customers, we also helped them develop a series of targeted Facebook advertising campaigns and posts.”
— Shawn Graham, Strategy & Execution at Deep Varnish
8. Beardbrand by Fuel Made
“As a Klaviyo Professional Partner, we have learned the tremendous power of email automation to increase sales, retention, and brand loyalty for our clients. The following emails are part of Beardbrand's post-purchase experience. Beardbrand's audience is built on trust and education. Our goal was to create high value post-purchase content to continue educating customers, and to build a long-term relationship.
These emails are triggered in response to specific product purchases to educate customers on the new products they just purchased. They also deliver information at an optimal time to help customers easily refill their products.”
— Lisa Oberst, Marketing Specialist, Fuel Made
9. Pinpaper Press by ICEE Social
“For the launch of Pinpaper Press, we knew we needed to educate the consumer on what they could do with the product. To do this, we made a pre-launch website hosted on clickfunnels, which served three main functions.
- Educated the consumer on how to use the end product.
- When the consumer ultimately made a banner and showcased it on their Facebook page, people had our logo on their Facebook page and we were exposed to their following.
- We collected hundreds of email addresses from people who made banners and included them on our first mailout, all of which are warm leads. It was an overwhelming success
10. Griliai.lt by Vytautas Satas
“For my client Griliai.lt (Grills Online Shop), I decided to build out a content strategy to maximize traffic and SEO. At the beginning of the project, I created blog website, Atrask Sefa Savyje (Liberate Chef In You), to reach our potential target audience and beyond. The blog originally started as a place to feature popular BBQ recipes and grilling tips, and over time it grew to include a new section called Griliai.lt Akademija (Grilling Academy). We used the Atrask Sefa Savyje (Liberate Chef In You) blog and Griliai.lt Akademija (Grilling Academy) as a place to promote the product site, Griliai.lt. These efforts, along with a social media, email marketing campaign, and the promo video, significantly improved SEO ranking and conversions on the site.”
— Vytautas Satas, Founder, DIZPRO
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