Increasing revenue year on year by 300% through improved website conversion and email marketing in e-commerce.

www.barnyarns.co.uk

See how I helped this industry heavyweight improve their conversions 35% open and 3.6% click through rates delivering a 300% increase in online sales over the same period year-on-year. 

Baryarns is a company based in North Yorkshire operating two separate sister businesses.

Sewcentre which is a seller of new and refurbished sewing machines for some of the industries biggest names.

And Barnyarns which sells high quality threads and haberdashery accessories.

I partnered with Barnyarns as a digital consultant helping them across all aspects of web, design content and marketing.

Our initial work aimed to improve a legacy website which needed updating and help to re-structure the information architecture, product pages, checkout and overall look and feel of the site.

We wanted to maximise conversion for users and after researching options felt that Shopify was the best platform to handle this.

I redesigned the website as well as managing the migration from Xcart to Shopify for over 40,000 SKWs.

I approached the company Director to understand how a web re-design and digital marketing campaign could help their business and set out a strategy to achieve this goal together.

We wanted to reach out to a large existing client base who were loyal but predominantly inactive. 

We sat down to discuss the long term ambitions for the business, discussing current strengths and weaknesses and put a plan in place to achieve expansion online to support the growing in-store and trade show sales.

We established 3 main points to look at:

• Content creation and SEO

• Website design

• Email marketing 

Creation of content to help improve search and increase the businesses audience was done to drive more eyes to the Barnyarns site.

The website redesign looked to improve the dated Xcart site and improve the user experience for customers from the look and feel, ease of use when purchasing, as well as the other methods we were able to utilise to bring customers back to the site.

First time promotions, upselling and integrations with platforms such as Mailchimp made Shopify an obvious choice.

Finally an email marketing strategy was put in place to target 67,000 strong customer base to re-engage them with the brand and maximising certain times of year and holidays to allow us to drive successful campaigns.

The old website of the website looked dated and tired.

Certain page elements also lack the correct contrast, were inaccessible and didn't make the best use of the available space.

The page structures were also not optimised and hadn't been looked at for some time. Whilst the user journey of fidning the rigth product, adding to their basket was frought with difficulty in the search and too mcuh friction in payment and delivery options.

We wanted to new website design to eb a chance to also rebrand Barnyarns as a show of intent.

The new design was also looked at in conjunction with operations, so that any promises to orders made online could be fulfilled and delight customers.

We looked at some of the best websites for sales not just in the same industry but across a range of industries, with particular focus on those selling lots of products.

We sort expertise from the Baymard Institute also to identify 'what good looked like' and how we could use some of the best in class design for the update Shopify website. 

The new designs focussed on making suer the product details and information to allow the user to make a decision were front and centre.

The pages were more consistent in terms of the overall branding and we looked to structure the product page so that we could show off the products, with a clear call to action to 'Add to basket'.

Colour selection was utilised to show off different colour types of the many brilliant thread products, whilst delivery fees and discounts were also shown clearly to set customer's expectations clearly. 

We took a strategic approach for the marketing for Barnyarns in order to ensure we could optimise user behaviours and holidays helping to maximise the return on effort.

Campaigns which looked at everything from:

• New website launch

• Black Friday

• Xmas holidays 

• Halloween specials

and many more were created and delivered with great effect and purposeful timing, including understanding time of day and week customers may be most likely to respond and how and what follow up messaging we would need to create.

Email design were tested to understand which were the top performing for our customer base and allow us to create templates for which to work on and refine in future, but gave us an excellent baseline for content we new would land well with users.

The impact of which can be seen in the open and conversion rates which are way above market norms.

Keyword research was conducted to understand searches were reviewed and identified competitors and the way people are generally searching for products aren’t based on brand. We also resolved the following:

• Inconsistent way in which customers could search for items was resolved through improved global search

• Information Architecture looked at to improve category organisation to reflect the way in which customers more commonly search for products

• Reduced the click depth, so less time taken for users to navigate to the right page and better

• Better page structures to allow Google to distinguish the page goal's from the content

Reviewing the sales information allowed us to also see that whilst there may have been 40,000 products in stock, many of which had not been sold in 12-18 months.

Stock on hand and future lines were reduced by 80% allowign the business to be leaner and give customers a better experience with the rpoducts they wanted.

Over the course of about 18 months I helped the business to achieve unprecedented success and develop strong lasting relationships with everyone involved.

Some of the highlights were as follow:

• 300% year on year revenue growth for the same period as previous year

• Increased customer conversion to 6.58%. Average ecommerce conversion rates are 3.18%

• Increased email open rate to 35.1% and often higher (47.7%) against industry standards of 

• Increased email click through rate to 3.1% and often higher (9.7%) against industry standards of 

• Re-designed website and migration to Shopify introducing better product and checkout pages, SEO content writing and much more 

There are many exciting opportunities and aspirations for this young business. 

Having established a fantastic relationship with the leadership team I will be aiming to help them achieve their short and long term ambitions bringing my expertise digital design, seo and marketing.