Transforming Boot Retail with Cutting-Edge Marketing
The Client
The client operates a privately held shoe company that is headquartered in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. The store sells in excess of 30 prominent brands and there are over 4000 boots to choose from for men, women and children.
Despite the recession-hit economy, the business is growing and getting stronger. The retailer recently expanded the 15,000 square feet flagship store situated in Fond du Lac.
The Challenge
The client got in touch with us with the aim to improve and expand on the on-going Pay-Per-Click (PPC) activity. While we had been working with the client on the online business’s paid search campaign for several months now, the main focus this time was to enhance conversions and cut down the cost-per-conversion for all the products available on-shelf.
1) As far as the client’s budget went, it was no constraint. There were no limitations with regards to the increase in amount spent for the project as long as it returned ‘profitable sales’.
2) The client’s business already had the maximum possible budget allotted and inspite of that, there was no visible increase in clicks and conversions.
3) On an average, the client’s product price was about $100 and there was intense competition from both the local suppliers across all American cities as well as companies that were at national level.
The real challenge here, therefore, was to maintain the cost-per-conversion while also improve and increase sales substantially.
The Solution
THE APPROACH
We designed an effective strategy to work towards meeting the expectations that the client had from us. First, we worked towards understanding the client’s entire business and then we thoroughly analyzed all the existing campaigns. We used various intelligent tools to understand the competitors’ prime keywords as well as their tentative bids.
With all our findings, we carried out a thorough discussion with the client, after which we categorized and divide the products for sales on the basis of demand, price and competition.
For keywords that were highly competitive, we kept the bid rate low, in order to be ranked between positions 3 and 10. On the other hand, for keywords that were moderate or low competition, we decided to keep the bid in top 3 places.
As we carried out our research, we discovered over a thousand keywords that were essentially ‘low competition’.
We then started to implement the advanced strategies on a regular basis. There was active monitoring of the campaign on an on-going, everyday basis. One of the most important and helpful things that we did was that we utilized the newest Google Ad Words features to ensure that the client races ahead of competition.
Results
Thanks to the strategies that we had implemented, the campaign and project were a definite success. A clear year-on-year comparison showed:
1. An average increase of over 75% with regards to month-on-month conversions (as compared to the same months last year).
2. In the previous year, the Avg CPC was reduced by 14.30%, Cost/Conversion (1/click) was reduced by 41% and an increase of over 66% in conversions.
3. An increase of over 255.19% in conversions during the Christmas season (as compared to the same time last year).