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In The Pink
Established in the 1980’s, Thomas Pink has become synonymous with fine luxury shirts and accessories. With stores in the UK, US, Europe and Far East the company has extended the brand on a global scale, becoming an international success story. In the mid 90’s Thomas Pink launched www.thomaspink.co.uk, extending its brand and enabling customers to order any of its products and services online.
The Business Challenge and Objectives
Thomas Pink saw ecommerce as a key channel in its business development plans. The organisation needed an online marketing company that understood its business and the market it operates within. Thomas Pink appointed NetBooster to improve its web site visibility and consult on search marketing campaigns for the UK, US and EU versions of the web site.
The Target Market
Buyers of high quality shirts and accessories – men and women.
Planning the Campaigns and Agreeing the Solution
Phase 1 – The web site review
NetBooster carried out a full site review, focusing on accessibility, visibility and site optimisation. The Thomas Pink site was built using flash technology which made it difficult to find for search engines like Google and Yahoo (in the UK and US) and local search engines in the EU. It was decided that the web sites needed to be remodeled whilst optimising the key landing pages. NetBooster worked with Thomas Pink to redesign and develop a HTML version of the web site. They worked within the constraints of the existing site structure, which meant that there were restrictions on the development of the site’s templates and the addition of content.
Phase 2 – Rolling out an online marketing campaign
Once the changes to the site were completed NetBooster was able to roll out a global online marketing campaign.
The campaign focused initially on search engine optimisation (SEO) using a series of keywords. This had an immediate effect as the Thomas Pink site began to appear higher up on the listings in the major search engines.
Thomas Pink looked to increase online sales in the run up to Christmas 2006. NetBooster was appointed to deliver a pay per click (PPC) campaign to drive up sales during the busy shopping period. The company had an affiliate marketing channel in place, using the Commission Junction network in the US, and Tradedoubler network in the UK. These were difficult to manage - a high percentage of the conversions delivered to Thomas Pink were from brand bidding. There was no brand protection on Google which meant that affiliates were bidding on the Thomas Pink brand while using the company’s display URL. These restrictions had a major impact on the campaign cost per acquisition (CPA) as Thomas Pink was unable to bid on its own branded terms.
NetBooster suspended the campaign to address the problem.
Phase 3 – Managing the affiliates
NetBooster was appointed to manage the affiliate marketing channel. By introducing a keywording policy to manage the bidding issue, improving the promotion of the affiliate programme (to get the partners fully on board) and developing an effective affiliate recruitment criteria, NetBooster was able to bring the affiliates into line with the Thomas Pink brand.
The Results
NetBooster devised an integrated approach for two of the most important online channels for Thomas Pink - search and affiliation.
Thomas Pink had little visibility on the major search engines before the campaign began - even for its branded keywords. By obtaining top ranking positions for keywords like ‘shirts’, ties, luxury shirts and tailored shirt, Thomas Pink had 136 top 30 positions with 95 in the top 10.
For the terms ‘shirts’ Thomas Pink is in second position with 155 million results shown by Google.
Despite the keywords restrictions on Google, NetBooster was still able to reduce Thomas Pink’s CPA by 40% to an average £10 on the Yahoo network. A significant saving for a global online marketing campaign in a competitive holiday sales period.
Jay Swanborough, Head of Ecommerce at Thomas Pink said:
“NetBooster is an online marketing company with expertise in all disciplines and the depth to operate on a global scale. The company has had to understand the intricacies of our business and our constraints – and have worked with us to achieve great in-roads into the performance of our website and our marketing online.”
About NETBOOSTER
Established in 1998, NETBOOSTER specialises in online Marketing. NETBOOSTER makes its expertise available to its clients for Internet marketing: listings, sponsored links, affiliation, traffic generation, online media, studio creation and strategic consulting. With a workforce of 100 people, and subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain, NETBOOSTER achieved sales of € 8.9 million in 2005. It carries the OSEO-ANVAR seal of approval as an “Innovative Business” and thus its shares are eligible for FCPIs (French Mutual funds).
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