How We Increased PSB's Conversions by 653% in Six Months
Real marketers know how to drive a clear return on investment (ROI). That’s what Velir did for Pioneer Square Brands (PSB) which saw a 653% year-over-year (YoY) increase in their purchases and Pardot form submits. Want to know how we did it? We’ll tell you.
Pioneer Square Brands designs, manufactures, tests, and certifies accessories for mobile devices. They’ve made some of the best, rugged cases and point-of-sales systems used by businesses, schools, and other organizations. PSB asked us for assistance getting more business and leads through their website for a recently acquired brand, VAULT.
Understanding the Client
To deliver such a significant increase in ROI, you need to understand a client’s audiences, their business goals, and which of their products have the highest margins.
That’s because learning how an organization makes money is pivotal to crafting a ROI-based marketing strategy.
We start all our engagements by meeting with our clients to understand their organization, which we did for PSB. Before crafting a marketing strategy for PSB, we had a collaborative meeting where we reviewed their goals, competitors, key audiences, and more.
Crafting Our Digital Marketing Strategy
PSB’s goal for our engagement was to increase revenue for their newly acquired brand, VAULT. We decided that three key digital marketing channels would be important to focus on:
- Google Ads
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
We chose this combination because they were uniquely positioned to provide PSB with the highest long-term and short-term ROI.
Our research uncovered that email was driving success for VAULT but had serious technical issues causing underperformance. Additionally, there was substantial potential to expand their automated user journey engagements through email, including their lead gen and post-purchase campaigns.
Google Ads
PSB faced a two-fold challenge with their VAULT brand. First, PSB needed to establish this new brand in a highly competitive landscape without the benefit of a long history of strong account performance. This meant entering auctions for a search as an underdog until the account’s ad rank improved over time.
Second, PSB had to battle for real estate within search engine results pages with competitors running search, display, video, and shopping campaigns. These challenges required a multi-channel approach that could identify low-cost opportunities that would provide high-value returns.
Given these challenges, we crafted an SEM strategy focused on paid search, paid display, and paid social channels. Then we implemented a multi-phased conversion strategy designed to maximize conversions, minimize cost, and provide positive returns on ad spend.
SEO
Email and Google Ads gave VAULT immediate bumps in performance, but SEO was our long-term play for growth. The VAULT website had technical issues and generic content, so we worked to improve the site’s technical foundation and optimize content to drive more organic traffic to highly converting pages.
Executing Our Strategy
Email Marketing Workshop
During our email marketing workshop, we reviewed PSB’s overall goals for their email marketing program. We also discussed their current strategies, analytics, personas, data setup, and design to understand how they utilized email marketing. This helped us find gaps and areas of friction, which we turned into recommendations and best practices to improve their email program’s ROI.
Journey Workshops
Our journey workshops were brainstorming sessions to discuss the different needs of PSB’s audiences and to provide strategies for their automated email journeys (aka drip campaigns). Based on their business goals, audience types, and how their data was structured, we determined that PSB needed the following:
- (2) Lead Nurture Campaigns
- (3) Post-Purchase Campaigns
- (4) Re-Engagement Campaigns
Here’s an example of an individual journey map.
Each of these journeys had unique logic, content, data needs, and user paths that would guide someone from beginning to end based on their point of entry. After determining what types of journeys PSB needed, we mapped out content needs, key performance indicators (KPIs), data requirements, and goals for all touchpoints in each journey. This set PSB up for success when they built their campaign automations in Pardot.
An entire user flow through all journeys for a specific audience:
How we planned for content and goals for each touchpoint in a journey:
Data and Pardot Workshops
Our data and Pardot workshops reviewed some issues PSB was experiencing in Pardot with domain names and unsubscribes. After the workshops, we provided recommendations on fixing these issues and training to help them improve their efforts moving forward.
Email Sending Health Check and Data Cleansing Review
Lastly, we reviewed PSB’s email domain health to see if their contacts received PSB emails in their inboxes. The health of email domains and IP addresses is crucial to a successful email program. We reviewed if PSB was on any block lists, ensured that their DMARC and DNS records were in place, and if their domains were validated. From there, we provided recommendations for any remediation that needed to happen to better their sender scores.
What we provided to PSB about their domain health:
Google Ads
We began our SEM work for PSB with an in-depth discovery process. This process identified the VAULT’s current market share, examined its competitors, and determined the viability of a paid media strategy across all potential channels. We also used this time to learn intimately about the brand’s sales process, how they cultivate leads, their current advertising pain points, and what success looks like from their perspective.
In Google search, we implemented a long-tail keyword strategy, segmented by industry and product types. This was designed to capitalize on more specific searches and avoid broad, expensive keywords. We tested match type variations for each keyword to identify which type would drive the best conversion volume at the most optimal cost. To ensure we provided positive returns, we optimized campaigns to maximize the value of purchases while minimizing cost per lead. Our search campaigns for PSB produced a conversion rate of over 10% and generated over $32,000 in direct purchases — without even accounting for revenue from form fills.
We leveraged Google display campaigns to target users based on a blend of first-party data and third-party audience attributes. We collaborated with PSB to identify a high-value audience within its own CRM, combining attributes like job titles, locations, and lead scores to directly target and re-engage these users, as well as reach similar audiences across the display network. We also created custom audiences, using search and site visit history along with in-market audiences to identify users who had visited similar brands and were motivated to purchase. At just $0.45 per click and with a 4.8% conversion rate, PSB’s display campaigns smashed industry benchmarks and provided a valuable source of revenue for VAULT.
After developing these audiences for display, we worked with PSB to develop pilot campaigns for LinkedIn, utilizing the audience attributes identified for Google to create highly segmented target audiences on the social platform. While these campaigns were short-lived, they drove multiple high-value form fills and provided over a 5% conversion rate.
SEO
- SEO Technical Assessment: The first thing we do with new SEO clients is a technical assessment, which allows us to discover and address any technical issues with their websites. Our assessment uncovered a few critical issues — the most notable was that the VAULT site took up to 10 seconds to load, causing users to bounce. We connected with PSB’s development team to determine how to fix this problem and significantly improve site load times.
- Keyword Research: After we address any technical issues with a client’s website, we perform research to determine what keywords we should use to optimize content on their site. Instead of focusing on high search volume keywords that don’t drive sales, we identify keywords for PSB with a high “buyer intent” to focus on. These keywords signal that someone is looking to buy, and ensure we capture users ready to purchase, so they’re more likely to increase conversions for PSB.
- SEO Strategy: Once we address technical issues and complete keyword research, we craft an SEO strategy for clients to drive ROI as fast and effectively as possible. For PSB we knew that there wasn’t enough content on the VAULT website and that existing content wasn’t optimized enough. So, we formed a two-pronged approach — optimize existing content and highlight new content opportunities. Optimizing existing content would deliver fast results by doubling down on what already worked. Focusing on new content would capture searches relevant to PSB that they hadn’t capitalized on before.
- Monthly Retainer: We set up a monthly retainer with PSB and used it to execute the strategy we crafted.
- On-going Content Optimization: Monthly, we provided content recommendations from changing H1 headers to rewriting metadata. We focused on pages with high-volume buyer intent keywords. As we made these changes, we uncovered product pages with little or no product descriptions. These descriptions were created and bolstered which helped Google better understand the content on the website.
- Competitive Analysis: As we aligned our basic landing pages with more buyer intent keywords we focused on building new pages to drive quality traffic. We reviewed one of VAULT’s top competitors and found 10 new page types that were succeeding for them but that VAULT didn’t have on their website. We used these insights to inform PSB’s content team of the new keywords and content that should be created.
- Reporting: Understanding website performance and how changes made to the website affect performance is pivotal to an effective digital marketing strategy. To monitor changes we created a dashboard in Looker Studio connected to all our data sources — GA4, Ahrefs, and Google Ads. This dashboard allowed us to track all major changes to the website and was reviewed monthly with PSB’s team. We used this report to reverse engineer the most effective strategies and double down on what worked well.
Our Results
Overall Performance
- Increased conversions by 653% in only six months
- Total users increased by 203% YoY
- Bounce rate improved by 33% YoY
- Email became the #1 source of traffic driving 3,270 users to the website in one month
- The previous year there had been 0 traffic coming from email
Google Ads
ROI does not include the value from requests for quotes, phone calls, or other communications that lead to purchases outside of a direct purchase on the website. That means that ROI is higher than shown here.
- We drove $23k of direct purchases not including the 958 conversions
- We drove 958 conversions
- We covered almost all costs on direct website purchases and this data doesn’t include 90% ROI
SEO
- Organic search revenue increased by 123% YoY
- Purchases and Pardot form submits from organic increased by 413% YoY
- First page keywords increased by 541% YoY
- Total keywords increased by 230% YoY
- Total users from organic search increased by 29%
- New users from organic search increased by 35%
- Sessions from organic search increased by 15%
- Bounce rate for organic search improved by 16% YoY
Need to achieve equally strong increases in your conversions and ROI for your marketing efforts? Reach out. Our team of digital marketing experts is excited to talk to you about how we can help.