By 
Aran Woollen Mills is Ireland’s largest home-based knitwear manufacturer, specializing in traditional and contemporary knitwear and complementary products. Established in 1965 starting its journey as a wholesale/B2B brand, Aran Woollen Mills wanted to bring the beauty, warmth and unique style direct to consumers. To accompany this move, they needed a B2C website, a marketing strategy tailored towards acquisition and eventually retention.
The Challenge
Having built a successful B2B business through relationships with leading wholesalers in their industry, Aran Woollen Mills wanted to take on the direct-to consumer market and help customers discover the spirit of Aran.
While there was some brand awareness that had been built over the years, there was still the challenge of creating a strategy that would direct high quality audiences to a well converting, best eCommerce practice site. And unfortunately None of these was currently in place.
Key deliverables included:
- Designing a premium Shopify website design
- Building a customisable and best practice eCommerce website
- Password/holding page to encourage sign ups through marketing activity pre-launch of the website
- Gross demand plan™ creation and ongoing strategy
- A marketing pre-website launch plan aimed at lead generation and creating awareness of the brand
- A full funnel Meta Ads account structure across key territories
- Email marketing strategy and consultancy
The Solution
To kick-start both the website and marketing strategy we ran a series of brand workshops with the client, to delve deeper into the research Aran Woollen Mills had collected. This helped to identify and prioritise core personas to mould the goals and functionality of the website catering to these personas.
Website
The origins and the manufacturing process of the products were not only a crucial part of the brand but also to the customer. We needed to ensure this came across throughout the website experience without jeopardizing the transactional journey. We resolved this by weaving in elements such as highlighting through unique illustrations the type of stitches used per product and informational sections revolving around the qualities and craftsmanship of wool to keep the brand personality throughout the eCommerce experience.
Marketing
We further utilized our key findings from the workshops to collaboratively produce a full funnel marketing strategy across multiple platforms and territories with tailored creative aimed at acquisition. This included a lead generation and awareness campaigns pre-launch to build awareness among our target market and drive subscriptions for exclusive access to products. We were then able to re-target these audiences into further supporting campaigns to drive traffic to the website upon full launch.
Alongside the paid media funnel strategy, the team developed an automated email flow strategy, carefully curating specific messages for the customer at the right time in their journey.
We took the guesswork out of growth and used the Gross Demand Plan to align targets to performance, to continue growth YoY.
The Outcome
Within the first three months of launching the new Shopify B2C site, Aran Woollen Mills could see the growth potential of the brand with both pre and post launch efforts resulting in over 10,000 sign ups and over 1,300 orders placed!
From a channel perspective, Meta yielded nearly 5 million impressions with a 1.46% CTR and just over 73,000 product views. Google also had incredible success with a $0.04 CPC and a 4.56 ROAS.
