White Mountain Knives: Working Above and Beyond Site Redesign
Justin Malone has run White Mountain Knives since 2005 and created his first website for the business about 10 years ago. His online presence hadn’t been updated or upgraded in that intervening decade until he reached out to 1Digital Agency earlier this year. We worked with Justin on our signature eCommerce custom design process, transforming his site from a relic to a modern, usable and engaging online face. But with clients like Justin, who are really committed to making big strides in how their eCommerce businesses are run, the end of the redesign project is often just the beginning of our work.
No matter how beautiful an eCommerce redesign ends up, it won’t be effective unless the site is getting traffic. That’s why so many of our clients choose to continue to work with us on a variety of digital marketing channels. Justin knew marketing was necessary to make the redesign have the desired effect. “I could tell that it was essentially a full-time job,” Justin told us. “I had no more time to do it. Why not find someone who was an expert in it rather than adding something else to my repertoire.”
With White Mountain Knives we overhauled Justin’s approach to organic search marketing and email marketing. In each marketing channel, we’ve seen successful growth in traffic and conversion. Justin has given us some amazing feedback about how the one-two punch of revamped marketing and design has shot life into his sales and we’re happy to present a snapshot of some of that success in this digital marketing case study.
eCommerce SEO
When onboarding a new client for organic search marketing we make sure that everyone’s expectations are set correctly. SEO is a marathon, not a sprint, and gaining Google’s trust will always take time. That said, there are things we can do during the design and development process to make sure that our clients are able to start building that trust the right way on the first day that their new site is live. Our custom sites are always optimized for SEO best practices, however, when a client signs on for an eCommerce SEO campaign during development we can take that optimization one step further by creating a keyword strategy. When we know which pages we want to push up the rankings for which keywords, we can do so much more during our development process. That’s why we try to finalize the SEO keywords before our sites enter QA for any clients who plan to continue with us for digital marketing.
For White Mountain Knives specifically, we’ve seen fantastic results in the 5 months that we’ve been working on their SEO campaign. When we took the campaign in April of 2018, not one of the 25 keywords we chose to target was ranked within the first hundred positions. Now all of these keywords have come into ranking somewhere within the top 5 pages, including first page rankings. You can see below how dramatically the average page ranking has risen, and that White Mountain Knives is steadily outpacing the majority of its competitors in ranking improvement. “Out of all the marketing stuff that you guys do. SEO is the most effective,” Justin told us. “This is the best one for me so far.”
Because of this increase in organic ranking we have seen a marked increase in both organic traffic and organic conversion over that same time period.
One of our core agency values is transparency. We want our clients to know that they can keep tabs on our work and be as involved as they want to be in the day-to-day decisions that make up their marketing campaign. From our SEO dashboard, Justin can track fluctuations in ranking, traffic, conversion and a whole lot more. We also work in a customizable project management space where we alert SEO clients on a regular basis to any tasks that might need their attention. The calendar pictured below is designed to help clients keep up to date with all SEO content which needs their approval. Clients are able to be exactly as involved in their marketing as they want to be. Some will want to follow every metric while others prefer to sit back and let their agency handle it. “It was exactly what I would have hoped for. I wanted as little to do as possible because of my lack of time,” Justin said. “I had to make more tweaks earlier on. Now I don’t think I edit anything.”
eCommerce Email Marketing
Email marketing is still one of the strongest digital marketing channels for direct return on investment. Justin’s site was 10 years old and during that time he had built a formidable email list of more than 20,000 addresses, but he wasn’t doing much to leverage this fantastic resource he already had. Justin had put in the years to build this list and we helped him put it to work. We started by creating two custom email template which would act as the framework for all White Mountain Knives marketing emails to come. We then tweaked that template for each email in a premeditated series meant to engage customers in the White Mountain newsletter and eventually convert them by highlighting products and advertising promotions. We’ve seen, just from the direct transactions coming from those email blasts, an ROI anywhere from 2.5X to 11X the initial cost of the email.
Each of these marketing channels is vital for eCommerce and has really helped White Mountain Knives revitalize how they’re doing business online. As the White Mountain site was being finished, and we were getting each of these marketing campaigns going, Justin told us that his sales had already quadrupled by the time the new site was live.
At 1Digital we strive to be a one-stop shop for a full suite of eCommerce assistance, whether that be design, development or digital marketing. If you’re considering revamping your eCommerce business we can go beyond giving your site a facelift. We can be the eCommerce partners which take that project beyond the launch date and help you create the eCommerce business that you’re envisioning. When we asked Justin from White Mountian Knives what he would say to another eCommerce merchant considering digital marketing he told us simply, “It’s worth the money. Let the experts handle it.”