Personalisation For Profits

Always Personal is a major e-commerce supplier of gifts for special occasions and their collection of personalised presents is one of the largest available anywhere online. From glass chopping boards to sequin reveal photo cushions, all personalised to your own specification, it’s almost a given that you, or someone you know, owns an Always Personal product.

It’s All About Standing Out

Personalised gifts are incredibly popular, but you need to be seen in order to sell…and that was Always Personal’s problem.

Search engine results were being dominated by competitors in this highly competitive marketplace, and Always Personal’s bottom line was suffering as a result:

“The business was not profitable in its own right, which caused a self-fulfilling prophecy. Investment in marketing couldn’t be justified because the brand wasn’t making enough in the first place to vindicate such an investment.

“It was chicken and egg.”

Watch the Always Personal SEO Case Study

Rob: I think we knew that taking on an SEO company wasn’t going to be a first page to Google thing, it was going to be a long-term process. There are some very fierce competitors above us, it’s like Etsy, not on the high street. Edge45® has helped us to try and bridge that gap. Since joining them in November 2018, we’ve grown the organic side 300% year-on-year.

Jonathon: I feel that the biggest challenge was the sheer volume of really well-established competitors that had been in the market for a large number of years. For us, it was a case of looking at the things that these competitors were doing well and looking at how we could close the gap and catch them up.

Rob: It was quite a daunting task to make ourselves stand out. Edge45® showed us it was possible, there was a lot of hard work ahead, but it was certainly possible.

Jonathon: It was a case of looking at the things that the competition were doing well and learning from that and considering how we could put an Always Personal stamp on these tactics the competitors were using.

Rob: Edge45® laid the foundations. We came up with a long-term and a short-term strategy. Fairly quickly there were some nice quick wins that we could have which we jumped onto straight away. I’d say the fruits probably arrived within the first six months. The COVID pandemic was probably a scary time for everybody. Our initial thoughts was pull everything back. I think it was a weary time and we didn’t know which way it was going. I think for the first week sales plummeted and I think they did for everybody. Everybody stopped spending. But then what we noticed after the first week is sales started to rocket. So all the hard work that they did started to pay off because the demand was up.

Jonathon: It was, obviously, a very difficult time for everyone when the first lockdown hit, but it was a real silver lining for us to see how well Always Personal were performing. We’d, obviously, worked hard in the months and years before that to build up the site’s visibility and this got them into a position where they could really capitalize on the massive increase in appetite for the products.

Rob: So with the increase in demand, we managed to pull back on our other marketing activities. So we managed to save quite a lot of money by just letting the customers find us organically from the work that Edge45® had done.

Jonathon: We saw a big opportunity to expand on our services and work in this digital PR component to the overarching SEO strategy. And what we looked at is the trending items on the site and we looked at how we could harness these really interesting products to build that site authority and get more awareness. Our approach to digital PR is content-led. So it starts with a creative concept. We put together high-quality content and then we then marry that content up with the right people and then we deliver that content at the time when it’s going to resonate most.

Rob: Yeah, so it’s been a really good journey with Edge45®. And I think from the beginning it just really felt like a very caring company.

Jonathon: So I think we’ve got a really, really strong relationship with Rob and the wider team at Always Personal, which has really grown over time. They’ve got a lot of trust in what we’re doing.

Rob: As a business, we’re permanently innovating. We’d like to go towards the wedding market next year. Post-pandemic a lot of weddings were unfortunately delayed and we think that next year will be the year of the weddings. So, Edge45® can help us to promote that.

“

Solving The Problem...Without Breaking The Bank

“We researched lots of agencies online and were keen to avoid one-man band freelancers, as accountability was important to us. We needed an established agency with a solid reputation for ecommerce SEO services, one that did things the right way.

We’d heard some horror stories from other businesses we knew where shortcuts had been taken to deliver results quickly. Search engine quality guidelines were breached, which lead to their businesses being punished and them winding up in a worse situation than when they first started.

“The problem was, however, that bigger, more established agencies tended to be uber expensive and not justifiable to us, given the brand wasn’t particularly profitable when we first took it on.”

Rob Harbord – Commercial & IT Director, D3 Office Group and Always Personal

Edge45®: The Perfect Partner With A Personal Touch

Edge45®’s approach to picking up Always Personal’s profits struck a chord with the company. They liked the fact that we went beyond talking about rankings and traffic in our pitch, concentrating instead on a dual strategy that also took conversions into consideration.

Yes, we’d increase traffic, but we’d also ensure that visitors actually bought something while they were there, too. This approach resonated with them greatly:

“The differentiator for us was how Edge45®’s approach didn’t focus solely on increasing traffic to the website. They would also look at what happens once traffic visited the site in order to maximise conversions.

Their confidence in their unique value proposition made it a no brainer for us to partner with them, and it was easy to make our case to the leadership team at Always Personal as a result.”

A Unique Solution For Always Personal

Edge45®’s team have extensive e-commerce experience, both through managing client accounts and running our own online businesses. We know what matters, and what matters is profits.

With this knowledge, we put together a clear, common sense, logical, robust, and comprehensive strategy to take Always Personal to the next level. One that reflected their company’s individual needs and requirements.

We looked at everything, from their photography and copy through to the clarity of their value proposition and expression of their USP’s. Coupled with our natural skills in SEO, CRO, and PPC, a plan was put in place.

Strategic Steps To Success

Site restructure: Better classification of existing product ranges to leverage modern SEO techniques.

Our Personalised Plan Leads To Profitable Performance

Increase in transactions

Increase in average order value

Increase in e-commerce conversion rate (3% to 7.3%)

Shopify SEO client Always Personal Christmas Stockings

Year on year increase in organic revenue

£££

In the 11 months since Edge45® took over the account, there has been a 402% increase in revenue from organic traffic compared to the full 12 months of 2018.

On top of that, for every pound spent on Ecommerce SEO, Always Personal enjoy an ROI of £4.53.

E-commerce conversion rate increased by 146%, from 2.98% to 7.33%
Transactions up over 392%
Average order value has grown by 8.54%

Revenue (£)

Month / Year

The number of keywords ranking has increased massively, too:

Keyword Position	Month Before Edge45®	With Edge45® to date	% Change
Top 3	2	38	1800%
4 - 10	17	157	824%
11 - 20	68	419	516%
21 - 50	155	1565	910%
51 - 100	218	1585	627%
Total	460	3764	718%

“Historically, our revenue from the website has been fairly predictable and consistent in pattern from one month to the next, other than 2017 which was particularly bad and was the point at which we decided we needed expert assistance from an agency to understand why and what to do to improve it.

Only since partnering with Edge45® at the end of 2018 have we seen consistent and sizable month-on-month growth in monthly revenue. Not only that, but the figures we are hitting each month now always seem to be the best ever, with the latest month yet again a new campaign high.

“We have high hopes for November and December, our most lucrative months traditionally, and we’ve even had to revise our targets upwards thanks to Edge45®’s input and results.”