John White Shoes had a website that was about to collapse. The theme that they’d built the site on was no longer supported by the developer and was incompatible with the latest versions of WordPress and WooCommerce.
Working with the directors we set to work on a replacement site. With time of the essence and a very limited budget, we agreed to use an existing theme as the backbone of our new site and customise what else we could with code.
Our brief was to create a clean and modern looking selling platform which showcased the brand’s century of heritage. We researched and created a timeline of the John White brand’s 100 years of shoemaking, using images and information from local sources to write the brand’s complete story for the first time.
We discovered that a regular query for the business was “where can I buy your shoes?”. John White is first and foremost a wholesale business so we developed a tool that customers could use to find their nearest John White independent stockist.
Our analysis showed that the majority of John White’s direct to consumer sales were generated through email marketing. So we placed email acquisition at the heart of the website experience. Using modal pop-ups, homepage promotions and checkout signups we were able to add over 2,000 new email subscribers in twelve months. We combined this with a Facebook ad campaign which converted with a Cost Per Acquisition of £0.07. We tripled email subscriber numbers in the first year and increased opening, click through and purchase rates.
Automated sequences in MailChimp replaced the old order confirmation emails. Now customers received great looking communications immediately after purchase. We also set up goal and e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics and Facebook.
The old site had been managed by someone with very strange ideas about SEO. We rewrote all of the old content to reflect modern search algorithms and relevant search terms. This has reduced the number of incorrect search appearances, lowered the bounce rate and doubled click through rate. Most importantly, non-promotional monthly revenue had more than doubled before the coronavirus lockdown. In this case, fewer site visitors and more paying customers was the right outcome.