User experience enhancements
We also introduced improved inline brand information on the product pages and elsewhere, ensuring new customers got a good feel for North Star’s USPs without the need to go looking. This also included better brand-articulation across each of NSS’s standalone brand offerings, extending to visual reworks of their category pages, and a content rework to ensure clear pathways to the brands and products.
We next took stock of the overall product and brand structure – identifying that North Star’s unique rare bottling offering meant that their products are rarely available for long. We improved the logic of how
products are displayed to ensure new customers encounter products currently in-stock and available to buy, rather than those being mixed-in with recently sold-out products.
Email automation improvements
This extended into investing in improved ux email automation; notifying customers who had shown interest in bottles not yet purchased when the stock level was starting to run low, with quick links to jump back to the site and complete their purchase before they missed their chance.
Digital marketing - the perfect blend
Google Ads: keyword analysis was conducted to unearth and target keywords/interests/topics/ audiences that are highly relevant to this specific brand.
Through a variety of campaigns, we exposed the brand to new audiences in the most cost-effective way. We used a mix of Search to specify the targeting, PMAx ads for brand awareness and Shopping Campaigns to showcase the whisky brands along with the other online retailers on Google’s top page’s shopping panels.
Organic / Paid Social Media - We split campaign activity into 2 - one awareness campaign targeting users who have previously shown an interest in whisky but have not come across NSS, and one retargeting campaign reaching users who have followed / interacted with NSS socials, and/or have visited the site and/or purchased.
With creative being so important in paid social activity, we a/b split testing different forms of creative assets (from static image to carousels to video) as well as different forms of copy with varied call-to
actions to find those that produced the greatest conversion rate.
We supported paid social activity with a clear organic social media strategy that would work to both promote new and current product releases, but also engage audiences and grow brand awareness for NSS.
Don't forget to mix with Email
Email - We Investigated the email marketing benchmarks for the industry and chose the best performing days / times to send out our email campaigns in order to maximise the open rates. We deployed on-brand striking visuals with a range of CTAs to increase click-through rates. And we achieved open rates of 40-50% - with the industry benchmark being 30%.
Results to date
Within 3 months from campaign activation -
“Navigating the world of Digital can be daunting & distracting. I love working with Radiator and the results speak for themselves.”
Iain Croucher, Owner, North Star Spirits