Hundreds of thousands of consumers visit the Just Add Ice Orchids website every year for care tips and decor ideas, and while the brand connects with them via its blog and resources, something was missing.
Here, we take a look at how Just Add Ice—one of the nation’s top floral brands—used the Shopify and HubSpot integration with inbound marketing tactics to create an online shop and improve and streamline the consumer experience and increase revenue.
Just Add Ice saw great success since it began using inbound marketing tactics to attract and delight consumers, together with the HubSpot marketing software in 2011. Its website traffic grew from 1,000 visitors per month to nearly 200,000 visitors per month today. The brand had more than 1 million blog views annually, which generated thousands of comments and more than 50,000 form conversions for orchid care resources per year. But it was considering what else could be done to sell to its consumers directly while maintaining a great relationship with its channel partners who have historically sold to consumers.
The brand encountered the following challenges:
After careful consideration, the Just Add Ice marketing team worked with Kuno Creative to build its first e-commerce website using the Shopify software.
Initially, the teams at Just Add Ice and Kuno wanted to increase awareness of the brand’s wholesale offering, the Flower Shop in a BoxTM, so we created several calls-to-action (CTAs) for the site and blog featuring the product.
A case of 20 mini Phalaenopsis orchids that comes in a retail display, the Flower Shop in a BoxTM was created for retail buyers interested in purchasing large quantities of orchids. The product was targeted to gift shop and small-business owners as well as wedding and party planners.
Just Add Ice’s channel partners primarily featured single orchids for purchase on their e-commerce sites, and the Flower Shop in a BoxTM allowed Just Add Ice to reach an otherwise untouched B2B audience interested in buying several orchids direct from the grower. Since its launch, the Flower Shop in a BoxTM has been one of Just Add Ice's most popular products, bringing in nearly $24,000 in revenue.
After seeing the options available to connect e-commerce efforts to HubSpot, the team came up with the idea of building a site on Shopify to connect the Just Add Ice e-commerce offerings to its HubSpot data. This connection would allow our teams to see the entire consumer journey, which would then help refine our marketing efforts. It also allowed the Just Add Ice brand to solidify its omnichannel strategy — reaching its audiences in brick-and-mortar stores, through e-commerce and online.
Seeing the potential for increased revenue and an improved consumer experience, it was decided that the site should not only target those retail buyers who wanted to buy the Flower Shop in a BoxTM, but that it also be geared to the consumer who wanted to have an orchid or two delivered to their door or send one as a gift.
Using the Just Add Ice HubSpot ID and HubShop.ly, the Kuno team connected the newly designed Shopify site to the Just Add Ice HubSpot account. Now, when someone enters payment information into Shopify, a new contact is created or an existing contact is updated.
The new shop features a simple, clean design with a strong focus on orchids and other Just Add Ice products like anthuriums and bromeliads, and carries over the existing Just Add Ice branding.
Kuno and Just Add Ice took a different approach for our next content campaign. Instead of sharing care guides or interior design ideas, we shared the shop.
Our first step was to send a “Grand Opening” email to our consumer base. We kept a conversational tone for the email and focused on convenience, an exciting idea for this audience who had been used to going to brick-and-mortar stores to purchase orchids.
The email example above struck a chord with consumers. They were used to receiving care instructions, decorating ideas or watering reminders, but when they opened their inboxes this time, they were greeted with a shopping offer and a coupon code. Normally, Just Add Ice’s emails see around a 15 percent open rate. The open rate of the shop announcement email was nearly double that thanks to an engaging subject line—“Introducing Just Add Ice Online Shop: Save 20% + Free Shipping!”—and new, actionable content. The 30 percent click-through rate is well above the usual 10 percent click-through rate that Just Add Ice emails featuring content offers receive.
We continued our email campaigns over the winter holiday season, promoting several offers and shipping discounts. We also linked to the shop within several current and historically effective blog posts on the hugely popular Just Add Ice orchid care blog.
The Just Add Ice website was updated to add a shop icon in the navigation. We also featured holiday-themed promotions in the site’s rotating banner and placed shop CTAs throughout the site.
In the first few months after launching the campaign featuring a series of grand opening and holiday-themed promotional emails and site CTAs, we saw a consistent level of traffic to the shop:
Though Just Add Ice is a widely recognized brand, there was no way for the consumers visiting its site to purchase orchids directly from the Just Add Ice greenhouses. With the integration of the Shopify site with HubSpot, Just Add Ice launched an e-commerce solution quickly and for very little cost.
Since 2011, Just Add Ice has seen several rewards from its inbound marketing efforts with HubSpot, including:
Now that the consumer can purchase directly from Just Add Ice, the consumer's journey can be completed, expediting the sale and delighting the customer. We can now use the data collected from HubSpot and Shopify to create content and offers more tailored to consumers’ needs and interests, rounding out our omnichannel strategy.
We can also provide Just Add Ice’s retail partners with this same type of content and similar offers they may choose to put on their own e-commerce sites. Additionally, we can use data collected from HubSpot and Shopify to make Just Add Ice’s channel partners’ e-commerce efforts more successful.
In the coming months, Just Add Ice expects to see exponential revenue growth from its own e-commerce page, and even greater e-commerce revenues from other online retailers. No matter where the product is sold, the home base for the inbound content—such as blogs, care guides and videos—will always be its own website, justaddiceorchids.com.
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