Background
Guild Craft is a brick and mortar store in downtown Guelph circa 1982. Their website is online since 1998. During the pandemic, the website generated good sales which convinced the owners to invest more into their online presence as a way to offset in-person offerings and leverage the network they'd built over 4 decades.
Challenge
- The online catalogue was disorganized and outdated
- Their old website was difficult to use resulting in customers calling in and requiring repetitive walk throughs of how to place an order. This was time consuming for Cindy and her team.
- Meanwhile, custom in-person services lead to owners’ burnout.
- The current website made the company look smaller than it is.
Solution
- Made it easy for customers to navigate and buy.
- Updated the product catalogue
- Positioned the company as a trusted place to shop.
- Made it easy for staff to manage orders, products and pages.
- Made it easy for marketing staff to manage and optimize pages.
- Launched email marketing campaigns to follow-up with potential customers.
- Coach store owners to prioritize Shopify store vs. in-person services as a way to scale the business and lower dependency on custom business.
Results
- Product catalogue is up to date and when changes are needed all Cindy does is send us an email and we take care of the rest.
- Email marketing campaigns help the owners stay in touch with their network which they built over 40 years.
- The company now services generational customers (kids' of clients) who prefer to shop online.
- Online sales are growing steadily.
- Owners are happier and feel less overworked.
Conclusion
Working with Cindy and her team proved the power of automation and technology for a small local business. Although custom orders is still her main business, we are glad to hear when she says that customers call in and order as a result of our emails or when previous customers place an order on their own without Cindy needing to walk them through on the phone. Our next step is building expert content library to preserve Cindy's knowledge and expertise. This will help save her time even more and encourage people to complete their purchase without needing to speak to Cindy directly.
