Case Study: How 1937 Hemp Store Turned Traffic into Sales With WordSmiths, Inc.
1937 Hemp Store is an eCommerce store that provides hemp products and botanically derived items to discerning health and beauty consumers.
As an eCommerce business traffic is valuable, but keeping that traffic around is even more so. 1937 Hemp Store needs to drive traffic to its website in a consistent stream and convert it when it arrives into sales.
Our job at WordSmiths, Inc. is to find ways to boost sales, starting with content.
What are the goals of the campaign?
The goals are simple enough:
- Increase traffic and domain authority for the site.
- Increase sales in a consistent and repeatable manner.
- Increase retention signals to build the store’s returning audience.
Each of these goals leads onto the next.
Our first task was to build the website up and get it to a point where it could compete in an increasingly competitive area of digital real estate.
Once in a position where the website had a degree of recognized authority within its niche, we were able to focus much more heavily on driving sales and assessing our successes through monthly recurring revenue rather than unique visits.
After seeing that uptick in sales it became important to not just continue the system which brings sales in, but to look to how further optimization can be achieved. One area of super importance to any ecommerce business is returning customers.
Therefore we wanted to see signals of retention start to tick upwards before we could sign off on hitting our first set of goals. Examples of some of the retention signals we reviewed:
- Increasing return rate as tracked through analytics
- Subscribers to the blog’s email list
- Increasing follow and engagement rates on social
How did we achieve the goals?
There have been lots of techniques and approaches used with 1937 Hemp Store and they’ve proven incredibly successful. However, two key areas stand out:
- Know your customer
- Trusted storytelling
With a consumer facing ecommerce company it is vital to know who you’re selling to, where they are, and why they’re buying. Only then can you input the “what” and “how much”.
Know your customer
For 1937 Hemp Store, there were a number of audiences who were known to be interested in hemp products. Some of these audience groups overlapped and some of them didn’t.
There is also global appeal for these products and an ecommerce store is in a good position to service that – so we had to consider overlapping geographies, and whether to universalize marketing efforts or tailor them.
After an assessment of available sales data and long conversations with the 1937 Hemp Store senior leadership we felt confident that the core audience could be quite defined, while not being homogenous.
This led to targeting a discerning customer profile who was interested in health and beauty and based in the US. The gender balance leans towards female, but not exclusively. The language balance skews towards English, but bilingualism (especially Spanish) is prevalent.
This audience knowledge helped us not only in amping up the rustic Americana aesthetic but also in selecting our topics, keywords, and approaches.
Trusted storytelling
All content marketing is storytelling whether we like it or not. The key is to both like it and embrace it.
For 1937 Hemp Store the opportunity is to tell the right story to the right people. The obvious story every ecommerce store tries to tell is that their product is good and will make you happy – there or thereabouts.
The problem with that approach is it won’t work on all audiences. Some audiences need fast-talking and even slicker writing. Others need to be scared into a purchase. The audience of 1937 Hemp Store are typically coming to the content and to the store as practically subject-matter-experts compared to many other consumer products.
Certain consumer products gain genuine interest and strong feelings from their audience. The audience for 1937 Hemp Store know if they’re being oversold or mis-sold.
We chose instead to give them quality advice as if it comes from a highly informed friend. We chose to use a tone that didn’t patronize or talk down to the audience. We chose to source claims from reputable scientific sources.
This article on botanicals for health and wellness illustrates this through a deep dive into the subject area with continual sourcing of academic papers. Yet despite the high-brow sourcing, the content remains light and friendly – taking the reader on a journey through the world of botanicals and ultimately ending up at the store.
The end results: Increased traffic and a higher proportion of sales
Through knowing the customer better, we were able to increase not only traffic but the proportion of traffic which turned into a sale.
This dual benefit meant that sales were increasing at a far faster rate than before, while the stability of content marketing meant that the product team were able to make more efficient buying decisions thanks to having greater predictive sales analytics.
On top of this, repeat customers are on the rise and our next campaign will focus on increasing this engagement further while driving that traffic higher and higher.
Our work with 1937 Hemp Store has been a strong success so far and we’re excited to continue our relationship with them now the growth potential has been proven out.
“We would not be in business if it wasn’t for content marketing. The content marketing strategy that Wordsmiths, Inc. has put together and implemented for our ecommerce business is our primary source of sales.”
Liliana Cisneros, CEO, 1937 Hemp Store
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