2013, for me, was a challenging year that included the death of my online products business partner at last February. (I will write more on that elsewhere.) Yet I was pleasantly surprised to look back and see that my project work had delivered some really excellent results for a diverse array of clients, and my own online store seems to be in a very healthy state, poised for real growth in 2014. The purpose of this website is to promote my commercial services, and in this post I wanted to review a few of these where “results” meant not just delivering a lovely website, but in developing revenue growth and other planned objectives.
I’ll start with a business I own a significant piece of where our trademarked environmental products are selling briskly, and we have achieved an annualized conversion rate approaching 6%. The real bright spot is on product listing ads, which had an annualized conversion rate of 9.08% with a cost per sale less than half that of standard text ads. We actually reduced our ad spend in 2013 to achieve a much better ROI. This an interesting topic that I want to write about in a future post.
This past spring I was approached to set up a brand new shopping site called LittleObsessed.com which is themed around the idea of “small is beautiful” and features a catalog of about 900 household and gift items across multiple categories. My general rule of thumb is that it’s a lot easier to sell one item than hundreds (on the web) because you can target your search advertising very specifically. So getting consistent sales was challenge that stretched on a month longer than I would have liked. But we hung in there working around theme of specialty gifts and again, Google Product Listings came through in a big way, and sales started snowballing around November, with hundreds of sales leading up to Christmas and still continuing. The BigCommerce shopping cart performed really well, and my client is also fully engaged in updating product info and images, which is very helpful.
On the corporate side, I helped set up a multi-pronged Google ad campaign that generated upwards of 6000 new members in just a few months for a major household-name pet food company that had developed a new pet owners portal. In the arts sector, we developed a community-based campaign to help a beloved regional independent cinema, the Naro (opened 1936), raise more than $80,000 for a needed digital projection system to replace their 35mm reel-to-reel projectors no longer supported by the movie studios. An interesting point here is that all of this money came from individual donors with no municipal participation (as had been done in the past) and we did not rely on any third-party programs such as Kickstart.
And to round things out, we were called upon to quickly set up a website to promote participation in a December charity golf tournament at the Trump National Golf Club near LA. With celebrity hosts and high-profile sponsors like Maserati, the event raised over $200,000 to support a global Peace Education Program that helps individuals develop their own inner resources. It has been having very effective results in prisons and schools alike. I especially enjoyed deploying some elegant new visual themes in this simple WordPress website, demonstrating the power of “parallax” backgrounds and single-page content flow.