What have you done that has most significantly affected ecommerce sales?
There are hundreds of thousands of Nespresso capsules sold every day and our market share is something like 1% of the total coffee pods sold within New Zealand so there is a lot of opportunity to sell more and grow.
For my business though, there is a lot of price competition and our brand is still relatively unknown. So finding a cost effective advertising strategy is important.
We are just two people, Suzy and I. We started the business about 4 years ago and it’s done well but trying to find and win new customers on a daily basis is difficult and difficult to do so in a cost effective way. We don’t have the big budget of someone like Nespresso, so we have to find smarter ways to advertise the brand and show people that it exists.
In the past we have run Facebook competitions with partners. We have found in the past that submitting products for blog reviews has worked for us. Google Adwords hasn’t worked for us because the maths doesn’t work for us like it might for another company. I met with an adwords agency and we crunched the numbers but at the cost vs conversion vs the value of the order and it didn’t make sense relative to the value of the product. Comparatively with my other business, My Pool Table, it does work because the value of a pool table is much higher.
This is a testament to you guys at Rocketspark. I found you online and I read the Search Engine Optimisation guide that you’ve written and I basically did everything that it told me to do and some other things too. And what that has meant is that when you type in Nespresso we’re pretty good for organic search engine results so it’s meant we don’t really need to pay for adverts. So that’s a really good thing for us that we’re pretty much front and centre on a free basis because of the advice that you gave us when we first started.
Tell me about your social media presence for My Coffee Capsules?
Because we are two people and don’t have a lot of social media expertise, so the stuff that we do do is to try different techniques and just give it a go. We try to post something once every 10-14 days because we know that Google likes regular blogs. We have Google business pages for our businesses and do live posts regularly. We only do that to encourage search engine organic results because that’s the advice you’ve given.
In terms of Facebook, we have about 6000 followers. We do Facebook competitions with partners whereby we give them free product and they like and share. I’m not sure if that encourages sales but it encourages interaction and I think that’s probably a good thing.
We do occasionally pay for our posts on Facebook to be advertised. It’s generally when we do a deal of some sort. I find that more cost effective to do it via Facebook rather than Google Adwords. That’s essentially it really. Just bear in mind we’re not experts, we try things to see what might work for us.
What do you do with email marketing?
We use Mailchimp and we’re about to launch a compostable capsule soon so we’re going to profile some of the blends we will be launching. We email out our deals and offers once every 2-3 weeks and also advise people how to look after their machines via Mailchimp.
We don’t joke around with our newsletter, it’s not snaps of a monkey drinking coffee, but we would do it if we thought it would work but I don’t think that is what people are wanting.
What about internal processes that you’ve implemented to help save time?
I’d never run an ecommerce business before and I like that the website is a 24 hour sales person for me. I like that time efficiency. People can see that without any additional effort from my part. My first website was the mypooltable.co.nz website and the first time a sale came through back in 2013 it was exciting to sell something on my website and that was a nice feeling.
If you set up a good website from the start, that works for you and sells 24/7. We are just a business of 2 people and when someone buys from us, they’re buying from the 2 of us. So having a website where we can always be available for them to buy is great.
