New Technology,Innovative Products,Creative Solutions.
Founded in 2010, ToU has the mission of bringing the experience of the joy of advancing and applying technology for the benefit of everyone. ToU specializes in the sale of unlocked mobile phones, tablets, cameras & laptops. ToU sells hard-to-find, exclusive and first-to-market devices to a wide range of retail customers, corporate organizations, wholesalers and resellers worldwide.
ToU fulfils on its commitment by sourcing from around the world according to quality, value and availability and sent from their warehouses in Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and USA direct to the end user through fast and reliable courier services that offer live tracking.
ToU retained responsibility of day-to-day web maintenance and determines product mix for promotion. The model aims to centralise the marketing effort to ensure a consistent customer experience across all channels of engagement. The team I have setup assists in creating the creatives and collateral associated with the products and ensure coherence in reaching ToU’s marketing objectives.
CLIENT CASE STUDY
y involvement with ToU began in early 2011. At that time, ToU was in the early stages of starting out with an ebay store and a recently launched website on the Volusion platform. ToU was riding the wave of the soon to be booming smartphone/ gadget ToU chose the Volusion platform as it offered them an accessible starting point electing to use off-shelf template with limited branding customisation kept costs low. Despite having a small database to market to (from the more stablished ebay store front), like many new websites – traffic was quite low. To establish themselves, ToU was prepared to offer deep discounts and promotional offers on the latest mobiles and accessories to garner interest.
ToU, helped by lower overheads by being online only, was able to offer compelling price points (often far better than major local retailers). The only problem was nobody noticed.
onsumer electronics is a highly competitive, price sensitive industry. Despite advances in technology and innovation in product designs, intense price-based competition has significantly eroded margins from the retailers. ToU, helped by lower overheads by being online only, was able to offer compelling price points (often far better than major local retailers). The only problem was nobody noticed.
ToU’s starting point on ebay gave them a small database to send newsletters to. However, these were rather irregular and didn’t look as polished as its competitors. ToU had ran a few local newpaper ads and reached out to friends, family and anybody who would listen on social media to help reach a wider audience. For the first few months visitors on the website were in the double digits and with only a few sales a month ToU needed to do something dramatically different to reach the national audience.
THE SOLUTION
With limited marketing budget, running national media campaigns to rival those of the established retailers was out of the question. The solution had to be relatively low cost but with extensive reach. ToU was still able to generate sales on ebay, so getting there was breathing room to tackle the task of getting more traffic on the website at a less aggressive pace. To drive more traffic towards the website, I advised ToU to include a business card with a voucher code that could be redeemed on the website on their next order. Further, pricing (sans the ebay fees) was actually lower on the website anyway. Meanwhile, a SEO campaign was underway targeting “buyer keywords”; google analytics tracking code was inserted so performance could be tracked and by the 4th month ToU was getting results with traffic increased into 4 digits.
s available marketing funding increased, it was time to step up the engagement to gain recurring buyers. ToU wanted to be the preferred destination for anyone looking to buy a mobile at the time the tagline was “Think of Us: When you think mobiles!”. Leveraging an offshore team I established, a newsletter template was designed and copy-writers helped craft compelling subject titles and offers to boost open-rates. ToU only had to decide on which products and the team looks after the rest – from updating the slider on the website and configuring to display key offers on the home page to creating matching posts on Facebook/ Twitter and boosting key offers.
y mid-2013, some of the SEO keywords were performing so strongly that if one typed in “buy iPhone” in Google, ToU was ranking just below or within 2 positions of Apple’s official website. With more organic traffic coming in, more consumers were noticing ToU. However, there were posts on forums (Whirlpool) that questioned their legitimacy – the price was good but is it too good to be true? It was time to redesign the store-front to improve UX and firmly established ToU as a trusted brand which now carried a vast array of consumer electronics encompassing of digital cameras, TVs, laptops, accessories, tablets and gaming consoles. I designed and delivered a fresh storefront for ToU on the Volusion platform in mid-2013 that was consistent with the “new” ToU branding.
Having worked with ToU for 2 years, I understood that staying on the Volusion platform will constrain their ability to craft new and innovative campaigns. ToU had to shift to a new platform that was more flexible and one which offered enterprise grade features. ToU decided to engage a separate offshore development partner for this project. Suffering significant delays and apparent technical deficiencies, ToU engaged me to consult on the re-scoping, solution design and steering the transition to the Magento back on track. The ToU website was relaunched in March 2015. To correspond with increased competition, I helped ToU step up their SEM campaigns and included utilizing “content discovery” platforms and increased focus on retention with retargeting, abandoned cart alerts and rules-based live-engage facilities.
THE RESULTS
Whilst ToU is now an established business with a multi-million dollar revenue base, the electronics retailing industry continues to be a challenging environment for ToU. Consumer electronics being homogenous goods are incredibly price sensitive. Competition is constantly springing up and established players with vaster marketing resources continue to vie for share of wallet. Whilst some functions are now carried-out by an in-house team, I have continued to assist ToU with creating new campaigns, opening up new promotional channels and developing creative ways to remain competitive.