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SUMMARY:
Many marketers and entrepreneurs I coach in the AI Guild have challenges with the exclusivity element of their value proposition. One solution – niche down. To spark your best ideas for doing that with your own business and clients, today we bring you strategies that businesses in the clothing/bridal sector and the pool/snooker equipment sector used to boost their conversion rate and traffic. |
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Kanchan Fashion is a clothing and bridal shop.
The team started with a simple pop-up on its website asking visitors to subscribe to email for the latest updates.
Creative Sample #1: Original email subscription popup on website
The team believed that visitors would want to stay updated with the latest fashion trends and updates from Kanchan Fashion. However, this approach failed to engage the audience effectively.
The conversion rate was low, visitors showed little interest in signing up solely for updates. The team believes this is because customers are now trained to see these basic pop-ups with no incentive on every other website and have gotten so used to simply clicking the close button on top.
The team revised the pop-up to offer a discount coupon in exchange for completing the requested information.
Creative Sample #2: Revised email subscription popup on website with discount incentive
The team hypothesized that offering a tangible benefit, such as a discount coupon, would be more appealing than just updates.
The increase in conversion rate was not as significant as the team had hoped. And even though they added social media icons to this version, it did not help them increase their social media following.
“The pop-ups with social links did not have much effect towards our social media channels. There were nine CTAs. People were confused regarding the call to action. We have learned that there should always be one call to action for the highest chance of conversion. We shifted to only one CTA in our final pop-up and removed all the social links from it,” said Shreshth Vig, Head of Marketing, Kanchan Fashion.
Let’s take a look at the final version of the pop-up…
Determined to improve further, the team rephrased the offer, presenting the discount coupon as a ‘free surprise gift.’ They also changed the conversion ask from email address to phone number.
Creative Sample #3: Second revision of popup, with new message for discount incentive and ‘ask’ changed to phone number
Since the ‘free gift’ was a mystery to the customer, they didn't know what exactly they would get in return. This made the customers curious enough to fill out the form.
“This experience has taught me the importance of understanding our audience's motivations. A simple rephrasing can significantly change the perception of an offer, leading to better engagement and results," she said.
Since the emails they had previously collected were getting low open rates and a delayed response even when people did open, the team changed the ask to a phone number. “By utilizing the WhatsApp API for broadcasting messages, we are expecting a significant improvement in conversion rates,” Vig said.
The newest pop-up had a 252% higher conversion rate than the original pop-up form. Here’s a closer look at the results:
Britannia Cues sells pool and snookers cues online in the UK and in a brick-and-mortar showroom in Coventry.
“As a business, we recognized that we had one of the best products on the market in terms of professional pool cues – the woods used, quality of manufacturing, precision engineering. When the cues went into the hands of professionals, they were astounded as to the quality (and the price). Unfortunately, the pool cue market is dominated by mass producers of high volume, cheap cues – we wanted to differentiate ourselves but also feature higher organically for our products, for those who are searching for professional-quality cues,” said Matthew Drage, Director, GD Sports and Leisure Ltd. (parent company of Britannia Cues).
The meta titles and descriptions were just set by default by the CMS which meant they exceeded the character limits and didn’t include any keywords. Also, there was nothing to entice customers to click through on the SERP listing from a CRO standpoint. Here’s an example for a product page:
Meta Title = Falcon Champion | Britannia Cues
Meta Description = The Britannia Champion Falcon is a full-size 57” (145 cm), ¾-jointed cue made from quality seasoned North American graded ash and a hand spliced ros…
Category pages and product pages also lacked keywords and clarity in their titles. For example:
Category Page Title = Pro Range
Product Page Title = Britannia 3/4 Break
“We wanted to feature on the first page of Google, organically, for key search terms e.g. ‘professional pool cue’ and also to integrate with Google Merchant Services, to enable our products to be found more easily,” Drage said.
The team added keywords to the meta titles and descriptions and reduced the length of the meta description. They wanted keywords that helped clarify what type of cues each category and product was so users could better navigate those options. And of course, those keywords would help attract more traffic as well.
For the above example, the team added the keywords ‘Snooker Cue’ to the meta title and description. They reduced the length to less than 150 characters, added the brand name and made it easier to read. Here’s the new meta title and description…
Meta Title = Falcon Champion Snooker Cue
Meta Description = The Falcon Champion Snooker Cue, North American graded ash, and a hand-spliced rosewood butt from Britannia Cues.
Here’s how that looked on the search engine results page.
Creative Sample #4: SERP listing showing new meta title and meta description
The team also added keywords to category and product page titles to clarify what the cues in that range are made for. The above examples were changed to:
Category Page After = Pro Range English Pool
Product after = Britannia ¾ Break English Pool Cue
The meta description was one way the team tried to improve the perceived value of their products. They removed the number metrics from the previous meta description (e.g., ‘145cm’) and focused more on details which bring a joyful, luxury experience while using the cue – the premium materials and the beautiful detail of a hand-spliced cue butt.
“We tried to focus on ‘the sizzle, not the steak’ as Simon Squibb would say,” remarked Mike McDonnell, Director, Glide Marketing (Britannia’s marketing agency).
“As opposed to stating specific product information, we wanted to focus on the experience. This is drawing inspiration from one of Apple’s marketing techniques I like. When they launched the first iPod in 2001, rather than Steve Jobs saying, ‘It has a 5 GB Hard Drive,’ he highlighted its ability to store 1,000 songs in your pocket. “
When writing these MarketingSherpa case studies, I find it helps for you to see a specific before-and-after example to get ideas for your own marketing.
That works for many marketing tactics, but SEO can be trickier. On the one hand, the specific before-and-after examples are even more important for search engine optimization where everyone is doing the same general tactics. So I find it helps to see not only what they were doing, but how they did it.
On the flip side, I’m including more details about the SEO project before you get the results because it wasn’t just the above changes that caused the results you are about to see.
McDonnell transparently told me, “To be honest, I did a lot and it’s difficult to decipher which got the results.” Here are all the tactics the team used:
Thanks to these changes, SERP keyword position improved for 42 keywords (12 keywords were unchanged and keyword position decreased for nine keywords). Some examples:
The team started this project on February 21, 2024. The niche site had received 221 total visits up to that point. Thanks to the SEO improvements, the website has now received 1,101 visits, a 242% increase. This has led to a 30% increase in direct website sales.
“Our customers are finding us online much easier. We have seen, not only an increase in web traffic, but also an increase in footfall in our Coventry showroom which is really pleasing and has increased our accessibility to our customers,” Drage said. “We will be taking our learnings and applying them to other related websites within the GD Sports and Leisure family – for example, SAM Leisure, which is currently undergoing a complete overhaul.”
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