What have you done that has most significantly affected ecommerce sales?
It was when we started using Facebook advertising is what really changed it for us. We use an agency called Mosh and so monthly we create a campaign in conjunction with them. What happens is we tell Mosh the campaign we want to run and most of the time we supply them with images to give a general idea of what we’re after and they create it for us — then we approve it and they manage it for us.
Facebook as well, we do a little bit of posting ourselves but most of it we do paid adverts. We don’t really have time to be doing a lot of Facebook posting ourselves. We find that paying an agency like mosh to manage this for us is more cost efficient than us doing it ourselves.
The other thing is that we also do an email send out, so sometimes we create particular specials only for subscriber customers. We have about 40% open rate so we are happy with that. We sometimes give away two free bars that month when they place an order or they get a code and get an extra discount when they place an order. We see an increase in orders directly related to an email send out.
We also have someone doing a bit on Instagram for us as well. Once again, it’s the same thing, we’re only a small team and need help with this from outside the company.
We did get someone in to look at doing our email marketing for us but when they saw the results we were already getting they were surprised. We’re not sending out lots of emails but we do send out some and I think we’re striking the balance right of emailing enough vs too much.
Our fundraising programme definitely helped to raise our profile. It’s difficult in the beginning with a food product where people haven’t tried it yet. There’s a tipping point where suddenly we became really well known but it took a number of years. With the fundraising programme it meant our products were getting out into the community so it meant people were tasting and trying the products and looking them up on the website — so that was a big bonus for us. Areas where we did fundraising saw an increase in online sales and it was reflected.
We also have a lot of landing pages. We set landing pages up for all of the products so that now when you search for different Nothing Naughty products those landing pages show up in search results. The landing pages really help with visibility in Google searches. Then we link off to specific products from the landing pages as well.
What processes have helped streamline your business?
We do all our label printing directly with the courier company now, which we didn’t to begin with. We are in a unique situation in that we don’t have to hold stock and can just make more product if we need it on a short turnaround.
The thing that I like about Rocketspark is that it’s really easy to make an immediate change to something so you can always keep things really relevant. Adding things in, taking things out, adding images or whatever. Anytime, anywhere, any place you can do it. You can bring something to market really quick. We can make the product and then have it for sale that afternoon, so that’s really good for us. Being able to manage it all yourself so you don’t have to send it to anyone else to upload for you.
