Hogies is a specialist online retailer offering discounted prices on a large selection of cosmetics, fragrances, skincare, jewellery and more. Their ethos centres on great products at low prices, stocking many of the high end brands found in department stores at more affordable price points.
Selling such high profile brands means that Hogies is often competing against a wide range of high profile retailers, many of which have physical stores that customers can go to to test out products before buying them. What Hogies does have in its favour, however, is affordability, so we knew this would inform our digital strategy and how we positioned the brand. In 2023, it became apparent that the Hogies website was making simple updates quite difficult, meaning they were relying heavily on an agency to perform somewhat basic tasks, which was hindering business growth.
We’ve worked with Hogies on their SEO activity for a number of years now, devising a content strategy to boost rankings for branded terms as well as more specific, long-tail keywords using blogs. In 2023, we launched a new Shopify website for Hogies to improve both user experience and administration for the team.
Monthly website crawls were run to improve SEO health. From here we were able to quickly identify any issues that were impacting organic performance such as missing metadata, 404s and empty collections, rolling out fixes to address them.
Our content team devised a monthly blog strategy to capitalise on more specific, high relevance keywords. Our blog strategy aimed to answer the most commonly asked questions among the Hogies target audience through informative guides and product comparisons. This approach generated a 234% increase in blog page views (2022 vs 2023).
We also focused on optimising meta data and on-page category copy for relevant keywords, for both brand keywords and more generic terms like ‘discount beauty’ and ‘cheap perfume uk’.
It was important that we built a well-designed, user-friendly interface to maximise conversion rate, revenue and other KPIs. The Shopify Advanced plan was the natural choice, as it gives Hogies a lot of the functionality they need out of the box, and also makes selling in other countries much simpler thanks to automatic currency conversion in USD and Euro initially.
The whole site is designed with conversion in mind. Product details are clearer, purchasing journeys are quicker, and information is easier to find. We made the check out process as easy and as convenient as possible for customers, introducing an accelerated checkout with Apple Pay, GPay, and Shop Pay front and centre.
A robust migration plan was put in place to ensure Hogies remained competitive and that existing rankings were maintained, carrying out thorough pre and post launch checks, and working with the developers to optimise category structure and filtering. We were also able to ensure that issues with the previous site were addressed when designing the new one, with our SEO team working closely with our Shopify developers to create a site that was ready to perform in the SERPs from day one.
Our email and creative teams refined the Hogies email marketing strategy to generate the best possible results. Weekly campaigns were developed to promote special sales and the best discounts available on site at the time, as well as competitions to increase subscribers. We also set up several automations, which include a welcome series, post purchase series, abandoned carts and birthdays. In 2023, a re-engagement campaign was launched, targeting a select group of the Hogies audience that had otherwise switched off from communications, which re-engaged 27% of recipients.
A/B testing continues to help to optimise the Hogies email marketing strategy. Over a period of 12 months, we have conducted a series of A/B testing to optimise various aspects of the account, including content and linguistics, new design layouts to support better click through rates, pricing displays and personalised sending.
In addition to template design and graphic design for email, we support the Hogies team with design across the website, blog and social media to create a cohesive brand experience across all channels.
Our PPC team is continuously making improvements to the Hogies Google Merchant Centre account, optimising product data in order to improve clicks and conversions. Our paid search strategy for Hogies covers Google and Bing, with Performance Max campaigns implemented to allow for effective automations across the Google network. International shopping campaigns have allowed us to target international consumers in the US, France, Germany, Ireland, Canada the Netherlands and Portugal.
* 2023 vs 2022