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Case Study: Class Act Tutu Internet Direct Response

Industry: Retail, E-Commerce, Lifestyle
Time with Thrive: Since May 2006

Summary

By utilizing Internet advertising and search engine optimization, Thrive Marketing helped Class Act Tutu, a mail order/catalog company and manufacturer of dance apparel, achieve massive results in just one year. 

These accomplishments included achieving top natural search engine rankings, including #1 rankings in Google for highly competitive keywords.  Website usability experiments were also performed to fine-tune their website and increase their visitor to sale conversion.  This attributed to a 500% increase in overall sales and a 200% increase in the average sales transaction amount. Also, as an indirect result of the Internet campaign, their products were chosen to appear in a #1 Box Office movie, as well as other top industry publications without any cost to them.

Objectives

When Thrive Marketing began working with Class Act Tutu, mail order/catalog company and manufacturer of dance apparel, they had been in business for 12 years and had a website presence, albeit an ineffective one. Additionally, they had a limited budget because they had previously paid another company several thousand dollars to create an e-commerce website that was non-functional, including several broken images and links. Their brand and website did not communicate with their high-end customer. They lacked an overall web marketing strategy to bring visitors to their e-commerce site, a previously untapped strategy for this mail order and catalog company.

Thrive Marketing’s objectives for the Internet Campaign were to:

• Elevate the caliber of the website to appeal to the two main audiences: large ballet production companies and professional dancers.
• Not only repair functionality and barriers to the buying decision process, but increase usability, improve navigation, and optimize the shopping cart process.
• Develop a cost-effective Internet marketing campaign, which involved the use of search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising to increase the amount and quality of traffic to the website, which would result in a positive Return on Investment (ROI).

Strategies

Thrive Marketing approached the project holistically.  Class Act’s website presence needed to speak to the high-end buyer, so we redesigned it and repaired the initial functionality problems on the website. As sales increased over the next few months, we made improved efficiencies to the shopping cart process and merchandising of the products. These changes were made based upon data collected in website traffic reports and customer behavior analysis reports and resulted in a higher visitor to sale ratio. Finally, through these improvements and by optimizing the website for the search engines, we increased the amount of qualified traffic coming to the site, resulting in a 500% increase in sales and doubling the amount of the average sales transaction.  This exceeded all expectations by the client.

Tactics

Internet tactics used in this campaign were divided into two parts: search engine optimization (natural listings) and pay-per-click advertising (paid advertising).  Thrive Marketing optimized several webpages on the Class Act Tutu website by rewriting much of the content and defining a proper linking strategy.  The results were tracked and reported on a monthly basis and discussed with the client.  Thrive also set up paid campaigns in several search engines with more than 500 keywords in each campaign.  These campaigns were monitored on a weekly basis on a keyword and budgetary level.  In the beginning, the paid advertising accounted for most of the traffic while the search engines were able to properly index the website to rank in the natural listings. This process typically takes 3-6 months, so paid advertising was used to give an instant boost to the traffic. Eventually, we were able to reduce the amount of paid advertising as the SEO took effect.  To date, the SEO accounts for 80% of all website traffic, which has helped to dramatically increase results while decreasing costs.

Results

The use of search engine optimization resulted in #1 rankings for “tutu” and “tutus”, the most coveted – and competitive – keywords in the industry, as well as important seasonal keywords like “nutcracker ballet costumes,” which helped increase sales during the peak sales season. Pay-per-click advertising was also used effectively to give short-term profitable results while SEO had long term results. To date, 80% of traffic comes through natural listings (SEO) while paid advertising accounts for only 15% of all website traffic (5% is direct traffic or from other sources). This split in favor of natural listings (SEO) has helped decrease the costs of paid advertising and also increased qualified traffic from the search engines.

In addition, as an indirect result, a top costume designer from Walt Disney was attracted to Class Act Tutu by way of the search engines. Because of the client’s clean and distinctive website presentation, Disney hired our client to design costumes for Disney’s The Game Plan, the #1 Box Office movie two weeks in a row in late 2007.  This was publicity the client didn’t pay for – in fact, Disney paid them. The client also had free product placement on Bravo TV and six editorial mentions (with photographs) in major industry publications as a result of the search engine results and improved website presence.

In summary, because of Thrive Marketing’s efforts, Class Act Tutu has:

• Sales increased by 500% in 2007 over 2006 sales.
• Increased their average transaction by 130% from 2006 to 2007.
• The largest single transaction has doubled from $6,382 to $12,004.
• Achieved #1 positions and Top 5 positions in Google for highly competitive and effective keywords.
• Obtained considerable press coverage including:
• Free product placement in the #1 Box Office movie, Disney’s The Game Plan, (#1 in ticket sales weekends of September 28, 2007 and October 5, 2007).
• Free product placement and article mentions in trade publications resulting in 10% of combined sales for 2007 thus far.

Just like Class Act Tutu, your website can be your silent sales force and your trusted business partner. To learn more about making your website more competitive, please contact us for a free website diagnostic or a proposal.

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