How We Marketed Whitegate Farm's Online Shop – a case study

Introduction

We wanted to provide all our FoodCommerce clients with a blueprint on how to market their online shops and consequently offered Whitegate Farm Shop our services in return for sharing the data we gathered.

We chose Whitegate Farm Shop because their FoodCommerce online shop had only just been launched and little had been done to promote it. They have a well established Farm Shop selling mainly meat from animals reared on their own farm. They were also local to us so we could visit them easily should we need to.

Summary

During our marketing campaign leading up to Christmas 2008 we took ninety-five online orders. A really pleasing result considering that the website had only been launched in September. Our campaign began on the 17th November and up to that point the website had received three orders.

To drive traffic to the website we used Google AdWords, which proved to be an extremely powerful tool and ultimately very good value for money. It did however require some thought and application before we managed to drive the right traffic to the website. Our goal was clear, we wanted people who were looking to buy online their Christmas geese, turkeys and other Christmas meats to visit the website. At the end of the campaign we had spent 2.85% of the value of our orders on Google AdWords.

Some people registered on the website but did not place an order so we followed these up with marketing emails sent through Online Connector. Our job here was to help people in deciding to place an order on the website. To make a strong association with the website we designed our email template to look similar. Our messages were always clear, simple and to the point. We spent £20 on Online Connector over 2 calendar months.

And lastly we reviewed the website. Our goal again was very clear, we wanted the people visiting the website to place orders. If they didn't like what they saw or didn't see what they expected we knew they would quickly continue their search elsewhere.

With our campaign in place we used Google Analytics to monitor how we were doing. This enabled us to see where our traffic was coming from, the keywords people were using to find us, and whether people stayed on the website or left straight away. We used this data mainly to fine tune what we were doing in Google AdWords.

Google AdWords and how we used it

Google AdWords is used to create and manage adverts that primarily appear at the top or side of a Google search result. They also appear in advert blocks placed on other peoples websites and on Google search partners.

It works because your advert is only displayed to people who have already declared an interest in what you are offering. When their keywords match with your keywords your advert is entered into a bidding process. Whether your bid is successful and your advert appears in their search result will depend mainly on the amount you are prepared to bid and the budget you have set. If the person searching then clicks on your advert you pay Google the amount of your bid. This type of advertising is often referred to as "pay-per-click".

We created our Google AdWords account and within it a campaign for Whitegate Farm Shop. Generally we went with the default settings which meant our bidding amount was set at "auto" and our budget amount £30/month. The geographical area was set to England, Wales and Scotland so we only advertised in the areas we delivered to. We created a single generic advert with a link to the website home page and then put in every keyword we could think of. We then sat back and monitored the campaign in Google AdWords and Google Analytics.

It soon became apparent that this wasn't working at all well. On the first day the average cost-per-click worked out at 30p, so after only 4 clicks we had broke our daily budget. When this happened Google no longer displayed our advert, so it wasn't seen during the prime surfing hours at lunch time and in the evening. We were also perplexed by some paid traffic coming from the USA, people we didn't want as they could not order from the website.

The first thing we did was take control of the bidding amount and set our bid maximum at 10p. This meant we could now get at least 10 clicks in the day. We were a little concerned that by bidding this low our advert would never be displayed, but this did not turn out to be the case. In December the Christmas market got busier so we decided to turn this up to 15p to make our bid more competitive. Towards the end of the campaign, when we knew just how effective Google AdWords could be, we raised this to 25p to catch as many last minute orders as we could.

The paid traffic from the USA was quickly dealt with by turning off “content”, this is our advert being displayed on other peoples websites, but unfortunately it was doing it all over the Globe. Sensing a loss of revenue Google soon wrote to us suggesting we turned it back on, but we ignored them.

We then retired our single generic advert and replaced it with separate adverts for goose, turkey, duck, chicken and three bird roast. We simplified the wording so it simply said what we were selling and that they could buy online for Christmas. The link in each advert now went directly to the relevant product page rather than the home page of the website.

Instead of keywords we now used key phrases. These required a more precise match with what we thought potential customers would type when they searched for their Christmas goose or turkey. Any keywords we thought were too vague or unnecessary we deleted including "Whitegate Farm Shop". There seemed little point in displaying our advert when the website appear at the top of the list for this keyword search. If they clicked the advert we would have had to pay.

The targeting of potential customers was now much more precise and as a result we began taking orders. Our daily budget of £1 however still wasn't going very far and continued to run out very early in the day. With our new found confidence we decided to increase our budget and the immediate effect was more orders. Eventually we were to set our daily budget at £20 . Quite how far we could have pushed this we don't know as Christmas came too quickly and ruined the fun.

Email Marketing with Online Connector

Online Connector is our own email and text marketing service. You use it to create and send great looking emails and then get feedback on how well you did. Our goal during this campaign was to encourage people who had only registered on the website to place a Christmas order.

An email template was created that was similar in design to the website. We did this to create a strong association with the website and the Whitegate Farm Shop brand. All the emails we subsequently created were then based on this template.

In total we sent out four email campaigns and in every case we ensured our message was customer focused, concise and with clear calls to actions. The last three emails were only sent to people who had not yet placed a Christmas order.

As an experiment one of the email campaigns we sent out, Fresh Christmas Ideas, had no text, only images. This meant the recipient had to download the images to read the message, an action which would indicate to us they had opened the email. We found this did increase the opening rate however the click-through rate was the lowest of all.

Our email performance compared to similar industry figures

Campaign	Sent time	Sent	Bounces	Opens	Clicks	Un-Subs
Last orders	17/12/2008 - 11:55	102	1 (1%)	38 (38%)	13 (13%)	1 (1%)
Three Bird Roast	13/12/2008 – 13:15	72	1 (1%)	23 (32%)	8 (11%)	0 (0%)
Fresh Christmas Ideas	09/12/2008 – 22:45	52	0 (0%)	28 (54%)	5 (10%)	0 (0%)
Free Pork Pie	02/12/2008 – 13:2	39	0 (0%)	22 (56%)	8 (21%)	0 (0%)
Retail B2C averages	-	-	-	(20.1%)	(5%)	(0.3%)
To view an email campaign click on the campaign name

Optimising Whitegate Farm Shop's website

It was crucial that having driven people to the website they immediately saw what they expected and ultimately liked it enough to place an order.

We gave the "Home" page a Christmas theme which began with an image of the free range geese grazing in the fields. This was followed by a short message explaining Christmas ordering and then thumbnail pictures of all the Christmas products that linked through to the associate product page. At the top of the right column we added a graphic inviting people to register for customer rewards. Clicking this opened a pop-up window where people could enter their email address and name.

Over the course of the campaign we were to add details to the "How to Buy Online" page several times. The feedback we were receiving told us that customers not only wanted to immediately see what they expected, as with the “Home” page, but also wanted to be able to study in detail how ordering from Whitegate Farm Shop actually worked. Our challenge was to present this information in a clear and easy to read way.

Conclusions

Taking into consideration that the Whitegate Farm Shop website was little known, our campaign only ran over the period of one month and the relatively small amount we spent with Google AdWords and Online Connector we have been truly delighted with the ninety-five Christmas orders we received.

In the coming year our challenge is to continue building the online customer base and convert the seasonal shoppers into regulars. We intend to use the same tools as we did here along with incentives and rewards.

Tony Fear
3 January 2009