As a small business of only six employees, men’s lifestyle e-Commerce brand The Ole Bull Co. had three goals: Eliminate the manual processes plaguing the business, integrate its laundry list of disparate systems, and better analyze and leverage customer data to craft more compelling marketing campaigns.
sought out a means to integrate numerous processes within CRM, marketing automation and email marketing without having to sign up the services of various tech tools at once.
The Ole Bull Co., which curates local and handmade American products such as apparel, watches, wallets, hats and compartment flags, saw tremendous results using small business CRM and marketing automation platform Automational. Within the first six months of implementation, the brand saw:
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A 10X increase in traffic;
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A 30% increase in leads generated; and
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An additional $20,000 in revenue.
By implementing Automational, The Ole Bull Co. was able to enrich its digital marketing efforts. Among its new strategies, the company has newsletter nurture campaigns that are delivered to customers for up to a full year.
“When we first started, we were receiving a lot of our data just in Excel spreadsheets,” said Sam Wheeler, Co-Founder of The Ole Bull Co. “We had a few different ‘marketing lists’ on those spreadsheets and we would segment content marketing to those people that way. We used a free email service, which was a solid tool for email marketing, but it was very cumbersome just having to constantly go in and do these one-off email blasts.”
Customer data is now consolidated within one platform, which gives employees seamless access to information and minimizes their dependency on spreadsheets and manual processes.
“A lot of our customers, including Ole Bull, come to us and they’re running off spreadsheets and a mail tool and maybe operate a variety of free software that are either incomplete, don’t solve the problem or don’t necessarily speak to each other from an integration and data standpoint,” said Nate Kristy, VP of Marketing at Automational. “What often starts out as a great idea to stitch together this network of solutions can end up taking more time due to siloed data storage in different places.”
Now that data and systems are integrated, team members can spend less time monitoring and aggregating siloed data and spend more time creating new web content — such as landing pages, online forms and surveys — that are then promoted via omnichannel marketing campaigns.
“We used to spend a lot of time managing the data, instead of really analyzing and leveraging it,” Wheeler said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “By bringing all of these components into one solution, we’ve saved a lot of time in being able to design, create, send and track all from within the CRM.”
Eliminating ‘Tech Fatigue’
Overall, Automational has helped The Ole Bull Co. eliminate the fatigue many small businesses get when they are overwhelmed managing technology integrations. For example, The Ole Bull Co. team was able to seamlessly integrate a prior tech partner, e-Commerce POS software provider Shopify, into the Automational platform. With the integration, the retailer is able to automatically tag customers with their purchases within Automational and segment email marketing lists on a more granular level, particularly as it relates to demographic and purchase history data.
In the near future, Wheeler hopes to leverage the Zapier workflow app to integrate Shopify and the back-end of the e-Commerce site with the Automational platform to more accurately attribute revenue to specific campaigns.
“We’re going to be able to start tying marketing actions to revenue, which is going to be huge for us,” Wheeler revealed. “We’re going to be able to say that this one specific web form or email campaign earned us X amount of dollars over the past six months.”
