Summary
The White Company is one of the few multi-channel retailers effectively exploiting the true power of the internet by maximising marketing return on investment through low customer acquisition costs and high conversion rates.
The White Company has tightly integrated a tactical e-marketing strategy into its broader marketing strategy, ensuring that it can realise the full potential of effective search marketing to boost online sales over its internet channel.
The White Company was launched as a specialist mail order company in 1994, offering a wide range of lifestyle products for the home. It has moved swiftly to embrace all retail channels, including the internet and high street shops, with its sixth outlet due to open in Leeds.
While the White Company is still primarily a mail order company it now operates as a successful multi-channel retailer with an increasingly successful online presence. Online success has been achieved through a highly targeted and effective search marketing campaign, utilising pay per click (PPC) techniques, developed and implemented by Ambergreen, one of the UK's top search marketing companies.
Aims
Katy Ingram, Head of Marketing at the White Company explains: "We wanted to increase sales through the website and reach a different pool of customers. As search marketing is a complex direct marketing technique, requiring specialist skills and knowledge, we knew we had to work with a professional company. Ambergreen out performed the competition showing clearly that it had developed the techniques and partnerships essential to create sophisticated campaigns that would meet our business objectives and deliver high returns on investment."
In addition to the aim of increasing sales and opening up new markets, The White Company also needed to maintain stability during the seasonal fluctuations of the retail sector. The content of its website is changed constantly, as eight times a year the site is updated with new products from the seasonal and sale campaigns. This impacts immediately on its search engine rankings and the key words for which it can be found.
Solution
Developing a unique mix of techniques, Ambergreen initially carried out two short term campaigns with the aim of maximising sales in the run up to Christmas 2002. Ambergreen monitored the results closely and this evaluation produced the critical ratio data needed to roll out a long term strategy.
The strategy can be broken down into two phases. Firstly, Ambergreen conducted an intensive analysis of the home lifestyle market, drilling down to identify the primary targets for activity and the elements that would shape the campaign and ensure the White Company achieved its aims.
This scrutiny established the size of the market, the potential return on investment and the thousands of critical key words and phrases, including common misspellings, which would deliver the maximum return on investment for White Company.
In March 2003 the second phase of the search marketing campaign was implemented across the main search engines including Google, MSN, Yahoo, Looksmart, Freeserve, Ask Jeeves, Lycos and AOL. The account continues to be run from Ambergreen's headquarters in Edinburgh, headed up by Grant Whiteside, one of Europe's leading search marketing specialists.
Results
The results of Ambergreen's campaign to date have been extremely strong with an initial increase of 15% in online sales made in the first three months as a direct result of the search campaign. The White Company has online customer conversion rates higher than the retail industry average and these conversion rates have consistently increased by one per cent each month since the implementation of the Ambergreen search campaign in March.
White Company's Katy Ingram comments: "We have seen a significant increase in online sales since the search campaign started and the return on investment is considerably higher than other direct marketing methods. We originally planned for a short term campaign to cover the Christmas 2002 period, however the results proved so strong that we extended the scope of the campaign and now see search marketing as an integral part of our marketing mix."
As a retail business the White Company is extremely focussed on direct response techniques and cleverly maximise the value of each touch point using every opportunity to capture data. The White Company calculates the value of a customer over the long term, not just over the first sale but over each return visit, to allow for the fact that visitors don't always buy on their first visit.
Tino Nombro, Ambergreen Managing Director says: "The White Company is an impressive business model for the retail market. It has evolved a cohesive set of closely linked retail channels making it easy for the customer to buy from the most convenient channel available at the moment a decision is made to purchase. Now combined with a powerful tactical search marketing campaign, the company is set to reap the rewards of sound strategic marketing."
"We wanted to increase sales through the website and reach a different pool of customers. As search marketing is a complex direct marketing technique, requiring specialist skills and knowledge, we knew we had to work with a professional company. Ambergreen out performed the competition showing clearly that it had developed the techniques and partnerships essential to create sophisticated campaigns that would meet our business objectives and deliver high returns on investment."
