Campaign Case Study: Selling Coffee Online – Trade & Retail

Frank Eaton is no stranger to hard work. Frank is the proud co-owner of a UK Coffee Roasters, a 42-year old company who specialise in roasting amazing tasting coffee.

Frank has a long list of sales and marketing accomplishments under his belt, including winning some of the largest Foodservice accounts in the North West.

When Frank had invested ten’s of thousands of pounds in web development, but seen zero increase in web sales or leads, he knew they needed to shift direction in that department.

Online sales tripled every year for 3 years (and counting).

“We have 2 websites – trade and retail. We only get sales after food events, such as BBC Good Food and we don’t get anything through the wholesale site” says Frank.

Upon review. Frank knew they needed to invest in marketing activities so they could increase new B2C customers and wholesale leads

At a morning networking event, he got talking with our founder, Matt Adams. Where he learned about the 10-years’ experience Online Growth Guru have in Food Digital Marketing.

Online Growth Guru’s All-round Digital Marketing Service allowed Frank to see an early increase in web traffic and sales. Frank couldn’t be happier with these results.

“Since we began working with Online Growth Guru, we have seen consistent increases in sales” says Frank “I’m now often keen to increase budget to see where we can take the site”

Here are 4 key ways that Online Growth Guru helped Frank nail the Digital Marketing arm of his business.

#1 Creating an event for bloggers

Outreaching to bloggers and asking them to come to an event is challenging. Especially when Frank just wouldn’t know what to say

Working closely with his dedicated account manager, Frank was able to create a brew school.

Creating a brew school Saturday provided a great invite story to share with bloggers.

Frank catered for 2-3 bloggers on the day and acquire several backlinks afterwards. This, in turn, allowed Frank to achieve front page rankings for his target keywords.

#2 Creating content for a jump start

Frank’s team’s knowledge in the coffee world is second to none. And their passion is incredible.

By employing Online Growth Guru to create content that converts into sales helped Frank get his team’s passion into the online sphere. He was able to generate traffic and sales from these content pages.

#3 Increasing Customer Retention

Frank says, “if we can just get them to buy once, we know they will love our coffee”.

Frank knew that with a little push each month, their customer retention could create regular growth.

He used our email marketing service to collect emails from customers who landed on the website and didn’t buy and anyone who bought and ‘opted in’ to receive emails.

It wasn’t long before Frank had a database of several thousand customers and by creating a ‘coffee of the month’ offer, he was able to maintain between a 60-70% return customer rate.

He knew that by having 50% new customers and 50% return customers, the business was bound to grow well.

#4 Sell for a life changing figure

Frank knew that if he could prove the worth of the website, he could significantly increase the selling price of his business.

He used the monthly reporting documents to prove the current and future growth of the website.

The growth was shown for both wholesale trade enquiries and sales figures that came directly through the website.

In doing so, he was able to sell his business for a life-changing amount

What’s more, Online Growth Guru were delighted when they kept hold of the client after Frank’s business came under new ownership. Partly because of the excellent referral we got from Frank and his direct reports to the new owners.

Their website continues to grow…