Taking a US eCommerce Website from $463 Monthly Sales to $3.03 Million!

1. Background

Our client sells e-cigarettes in the US through an online store. In his own words, the client told us that he was taking a “final punt” on the website by investing in marketing. In the month that we started working with the client, the website only made $468 in sales. He needed us to help turn the business around, otherwise, he’d have to shut up shop.

Caption: the image above shows the number of visitors coming to the client’s website via Google searches over the first twelve months of our work. 

2. Objective

Due to regulations, e-cigarette websites can’t promote themselves through PPC advertising or ads on social media. This meant that the client depended on his customers finding his website through Google searches. Fortunately, helping businesses get found by customers is exactly what we do!

Caption: the graph above shows how our client’s sales grew over the first twelve months of the campaign. Note that other than some signs of life, things didn’t get moving until a good nine months in.

3. Strategy

We took two main approaches to help our client earn more customers. First, we decided to improve our client’s website by fixing various issues and smoothing out any rough edges. Once we were happy with our on-site work, we worked on getting our client’s business featured in several key websites.

• We started by researching a list of keywords. For our client, these are phrases that potential customers put into Google or other search engines when they want to buy e-cigarettes online.
  
• We edited our client’s page titles and meta descriptions. These snippets are the ones you’ll see after you press “enter” on a Google search that give searchers more information about a website. If you improve these snippets, you’ll earn more traffic.
  
• To help visitors get around our client’s website, we improved the links between the different pages on the website. Customers won’t buy from your website if they can’t get around easily!
  
• We started publishing blog content on our client’s site once a week. The blog content covered the latest developments in e-cigarettes and compared the risks of smoking versus the risks of using e-cigarettes.
  
• To help potential customers make the right purchase, we also created in-depth product guides that compared different brands of e-cigarettes. These guides proved very popular and they are often the first thing you’ll find in Google if you search for information about a particular type of e-cigarette!
  
• We started writing about e-cigarettes on several different websites. At one point we had a regular column in one of the industry’s top websites. Our writing was never too promotional — we always tried to provide value to our readers and this helped us build a loyal following.
  
• Early on, we were able to run several competitions with expensive e-cigarette kit as the top prize. One of these competitions attracted 30,000 entries at a point when the client’s business was still relatively small. This helped kickstart their following on social media and paved the way for further growth.

Caption: sales have grown steadily throughout the campaign! Please don’t panic about the drop in the graph towards the end! This was a tracking code issue, not a sales issue.

4. Package

Our client started on a medium-sized package, but they were keen to increase their marketing budget when they saw that they were making a massive return on their investment. The website saw improvements within the first three months, but it wasn’t until twelve months later that growth took off. At this point, they doubled their package size and became Exposure Ninja’s largest client.

5. Results

If we compare our client’s best-ever month for sales with the figures for when we started work, the results are simply exceptional.

• We increased the total number of monthly visitors to the client’s website by 42,720%.
• We increased the number of people coming to the client’s site through Google searches by 65,469%.
• We increased monthly sales by 622,316%.

It’s worth saying again that this growth happened without any other form of paid advertising. This client remains with Exposure Ninja to this day and has taken us on to do the online marketing for other business ventures they have started.