The Brief
Celia was referred to me because she had initially built her website herself but now the business had grown to the extent that she needed expert guidance on how to grow her business online. Celia produces her own range of natural beauty care products and is passionate about educating people on the importance of proper skincare. Celia’s customers are very loyal and she is very cognisant of the importance of word-of-mouth to her business. She wished to harness that loyalty and create a symbiotic relationship with her customers.
My brief was to advise and implement an online marketing strategy which included a website overhaul, with an emphasis on education and customer care. Celia was an ideal client because she was already very knowledgeable on eCommerce and had many ideas on how she could grow her business online.
Our Approach
We worked through Celia’s ideas and we also had many recommendations for growing her business online.
Much work was needed in order to achieve Celia’s goals and the following was implemented over a period of approx. 12 months:
=> We stayed with WordPress as a platform because of its robustness and upgraded the theme to give the site a more modern look and feel, ensuring that the branding was carried through the site. The shopping cart was also changed to one which offered more in terms of options for functionality
=> Celia wished to give her customers a choice of payment methods so we integrated a merchant account payment gateway with the new website shopping cart.
=> We introduced options for up-selling and cross-selling, a product offers and discounts system and a customer loyalty system.
=> We gave Celia the ability to track her website visitors through the website to identify the weaknesses in her customer experience. We also added Facebook tracking pixels to her site so that she could track the behaviour of her Facebook visitors.
=> E-mail marketing was already being implemented, but we needed to optimize opportunities to gain email sign-ups on the website through pop-ups, during the checkout stage and by offering regular incentives
=> Because social media is Celia’s biggest referrer of visitors, we maximized on opportunities for visitors to engage via social media. For example, we introduced ‘Pin It’ buttons to each product image, sharing buttons on single post pages and links to all social media profiles on the footer of each page.
=> We conducted research to determine relevant keywords which were being used often in Google searches. We then looked at the Google Adwords competition for these keywords and selected keywords which were used often but for which competition was not too high. We populated our pages with these keywords, while keeping the text easy to read.
=> We conducted extensive on-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to make the site as visible and easy-to-navigate as possible for the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
The Result
Celia was right about her loyal customers as they were very happy to give glowing product reviews which are now widespread throughout her site. Reviews like these are generally accepted as authentic and trustworthy and are thus very valuable to Celia.
Celias sales have been boosted by xx% since all of the aforementioned measures were implemented.
Celia now employs me to conduct routine maintenance on her site. This includes quarterly updates, regular backups, security measures and checks for any search engine indexing issues. I send her a quarterly report and she has peace of mind knowing that there is someone looking after this aspect of her business.
Celia sells 100% natural bodycare products of premium quality both online and offline. her brand advocates are equally as passionate and you can view many positive product reviews on her website www.nia.ie.
The Feedback
Noelle is a joy to work with, she is professional, hardworking, intuitive and pays great attention to detail. She knows what’s needed to produce a professional website that’s easy to navigate and has a quality look and feel.
Noelle will listen and follow your brief and improve on the original concept. I love working with Noelle and use her service for updates and ongoing maintenance in the knowledge that I get exactly what I want.