How this business earned an extra $36,000 in revenue without ads
From post-holiday slump to boomtown – how we helped this craft business have its best month ever and unlock the secrets to sustainable growth.
The Brief
This small craft business started out as a hobby – but it grew quickly. The business owner could see the potential, and knew that getting some experts on the job would be the best way to ensure the job was done right. The key goals were to improve the website and increase sales, while maintaining the professionalism and great customer service experience the business had become known for.
The Challenge
We needed to help them build a sustainable revenue pipeline that would see an end to the “feast or famine” sales rollercoaster they were on – moving the business forward into a place of steady growth instead.
The business also didn’t want to spend money on ads, as they wisely didn’t want to become too reliant on any particular advertising channel on social media.
How We Did It
The big opportunity for this business was in their email list. We’re experts in making ads work for people, but it’s a grave mistake for any business to rely on this alone – there are simply too many factors outside your control. When your sales rely on social media, it only takes one algorithm change or for a bot to delete your account for you to lose it all – having all your eggs in one basket can lead to disaster!
That’s why the smart play for any business is to make sure they have reliable ways to get people off social media channels and onto their email lists. By making sure your email content is valuable and resonates with your audience, and then setting up the right nurture sequences you can have your customers feeling the love and spending their money without adding additional administrative burden to your business.
Now, using email to get people shopping at your online store is great – but you also have to make sure that your store is fully optimised so that when they get there, they actually buy.
Building Sustainable Income from the Ground Up:
Shopify and Klaviyo – the perfect match for sales.
The first vital step was to get them off MailChimp and onto Klaviyo – this allowed us to take advantage of the much better integration between Klaviyo and Shopify.
An irresistible “lead magnet” to build the list
The next step was to set up a popup on the website, offering visitors a valuable resource in exchange for their email addresses. This “lead magnet” campaign collected emails and also built trust and rapport with the website visitors by giving them a beginner’s guide that demonstrated the businesses’ expertise and got them excited and inspired to start doing this craft themselves.
A warm welcome – automatically.
Once they were on the list, we warmed them up with educational and sales content in a welcome series and set up the abandoned cart and abandoned browse email flows – these emails automatically followed people up if they browsed without buying, giving them more information and incentives to come back and spend.
In addition, we ran regular email campaigns to the audience to keep customers engaged and aware of any promotions or specials that the brand was running.
The Results
We saw immediate results. The business gained more than $20,000 from the automated flows we set up in just 90 days. On average every single new subscriber to the list added just under $20 to their bottom line in their first month of getting emails.
January is traditionally a “dead month” for this business – like many other businesses of this type, people tend to stop spending after the holiday season. January is reliably so slow that the business owner takes the whole month off and has a well-earned holiday.
Imagine their delight when our automated sequences earned the business almost 8K in January alone without them needing to do a thing – a growth of 290% on previous years! No campaign emails, no ads – just the nurture sequences and optimised website doing their thing, keeping sales rolling in. The business owner sent ONE email at the end of the month, and the rest was already on autopilot – now that’s working smarter, not harder!
The Lesson
The key thing to learn here for your business, is that setting automated sales funnels up (the right way!) can deliver sustainable ongoing sales. This doesn’t just deliver revenue to the business – it gives business owners peace of mind, too, knowing that you have that reliable income, year round – even in months when things used to be dead.