Find out how this designer achieved over 200% online sales growth in 3 months!
Have you created your own label? Designed your own range or established your own brand?
Whether it is clothing or something else, being a designer/maker/creator/brand-owner is often as much a passion-project as it is a sensible, logical, business proposition. Do you agree?
Which is a good thing, considering how many OTHER designers/makers/creators/brand-owners are already out there in the marketplace…
If we stopped to think about this logically we’d probably never ever launch, right?
The good thing is, just because someone invented the original baby onesie doesn’t mean there’s no room in the market for a funky new design!
My client Andrea, founder of Kapow Kids Clothing, is one such designer. She was inspired by her son to create some cool threads with loads of personality.
Read on to learn how she grew her online sales over 200% in 3 months and on track to double again in the next 6 months!
A promising start
Andrea came to me at the start of the year. She had been in business for a couple of years already and things were going well. She’d already developed a strong following on Instagram and had a nice posse of wholesalers placing indent orders each season.
However, her online sales were a little more unpredictable and tended to drop off very quickly after each new season launch. She was confident that the demand was there, and with the profit margin higher on sales through her online store, she was dead keen to grow this side of her business.
To drive that growth, she ordered a lot more stock for Autumn/Winter 2017 season. From memory, it was about double her previous season! What gumption!
BUT now she had to figure out how to sell it all!
Here are the 5 things Andrea did
1. Increase website sales conversions
Andrea’s website runs on Shopify platform and, like many of my clients, she built it herself using a Shopify theme. It wasn’t terrible, but it also wasn’t converting that well. It was sitting at about 1.5% conversion rate.
We made some tweaks to her website navigation, her home page layout, shop pages and checkout process. Our goal was to convert more of her website visitors into customers, and we were able to increase her conversion rate to just under 3.5%.
Think about it, even a 1% increase in conversions results in a huge lift in sales off the same amount of traffic!
2. Focus on email list building
Andrea already had a fantastic following on Instagram, but it’s important not to throw all our marketing eggs into one basket. None of us has any ownership over our audiences on Instagram or Facebook. Audience ownership belongs to the platforms.
Therefore it’s hugely important to focus on growing your own email database. And that’s what Andrea did.
With the right tech tools in place as well as a persuasive email campaign, Andrea’s email list AND her sales started growing very quickly.
3. Automate
As a small business owner with a growing business, Andrea was keen to take advantage of automating some of her marketing. Marketing automation is like adding extra sales, marketing and customer service staff to your team, all rolled up into one nifty application!
Andrea was able to automate three key campaigns in her business:
- Nurture and convert new email subscribers into first time customers,
- Welcome first time customers and invite them to come back and buy again, and
- Pick up customers who abandoned their shopping carts.
“Catherine taught me all about customer on-boarding, so I now have an automated email sequence that provides customers with excellent customer service. I now get so many replies from customers saying how happy they are with the customer service.”
4. Master Facebook advertising
Andrea freely says, “I had tried to do Facebook ads before, but they never seemed to work!”
She knew her customers were on Facebook and Instagram, but her ads weren’t reaching them or convincing them to click through and buy. This is so common!
Now she has her ads up and running and kicking-ass. But not only that, she also knows how to track the effectiveness of the ads and whether they are generating sales for a reasonable price.
This makes it SO much easier to replicate this success in her future campaigns, now that she knows what her customers actually respond to!
5. Become THE brand your customers absolutely love and adore!
How do you make your brand enticing enough to break through the noise of a competitive marketplace? How do you stand out from your competition and actually get people to buy from you?
Andrea had made an excellent start with her brand Kapow Kids. People loved how it was a bit funky and edgy and had a bit of personality.
But she hadn’t quite mastered how to do this ‘brand thing’. That is, building a really strong, cohesive brand that really cuts through the clutter and connects with your audience.
So we worked on her brand, describing it as a ‘universe’.
How should the Kapow Kids universe look (products, logo and images), sound (the language she uses on her website, emails and social media) and feel (receiving the orders, products themselves, plus the customer experience throughout).
Where to next? The sky’s the limit!
“It’s only been a few months since implementing Catherine’s tips, but I can already see the success of her tips working. Especially in the Facebook ads and the customer on-boarding email sequence that we have set up.
I am really excited to see how her changes improve things for me over the next 12 months. Next season I have doubled the stock that I have ordered, so I’m hoping to double sales again.
That would mean a 400% increase in 6 months! So my goals have definitely increased after working with Catherine. I’m really excited about this growth in my business.
I would recommend Catherine to anyone who wants to have a good look over their brand and their online store to see how you can make improvements.
Its amazing when you make little tweaks here and there how they add up to many more sales each day!”
Download my free ‘Perfect Ad Template’
My Perfect Facebook Ad Template is a quick and easy guide that will have you ROCKING your Facebook Ads for your eCommerce store!
