Delivering double digit growth with 18% less website traffic

19 Dec 2018 Dominic Comments Off on Delivering double digit growth with 18% less website traffic

Retail in 2018 as we all know has been challenging for many companies. Lack of demand, poor footfall and reduced appetite for the high street has affected UK retailers – with mnay having to invest more and more to get those new customers and repeat demand.

However what happens when you work in a sector which is highly regulated and restrictive in terms of what you can and cannot say? I was proving ECommerce consulatncy in one of these sectors this year and this was the huge challenge I had – how do I drive growth in this challenging environment?

The company itself had not invested in Ecommerce or Brand over the previous 4 or 5 years and was a brand in decline with little or no commercial focus or innovative product development. The result of this was that traffic to the website was down by 24% YOY – not helped by promotional restrictions between January and April (ie where we could promote the year before we now could not) – you can clearly see the decline in traffic below.

Despite this decline in traffic YOY by 24%, I managed to drive growth across 7 of the 8 main Ecommerce KPIs I normally track to. As an ECommerce consultant, you need to be able to come in and quickly assess what is working, what is not and implement a growth strategy – which is what I did as you can see from the results below.

As you can see, in a difficult trading climate with lack of investment, brand in decline and promotional restrictions, I am pleased to say that I delivered positive YOY growth. Whilst some activity was glaringly missing (eg capturing email leads) other activity required more focus on better trading, relevant offers and ensuring that we were offering the right products to the right customer at the right time.

Overhauling the trading of the site, assessing and improving relevant traffic to the site plus greater focus on retaining the existing customer base with timely contact ensured all these KPIS were positive. Whilst second orders were negative, this was still a vast improvement on the -46% it had been the year before – see results for the same period the year before:

The above is an example of the results I can get by applying a simple model which I have used to drive growth across a variety of online retailers. I am pleased to say the retailer is now in a good position in terms of investment in the brand for growth over the coming years.

Categories: All Posts, Planning, Strategy, Traffic

Tags: customer retention, Small Business Blog, strategy, Trading Tips