Eliminating the Purchasing Barriers:

With the fall and winter jewelry season on the way, Diamond Vendors aimed to use its website to attract new leads and drive sales, while supplementing its existing brick-and-mortar business. Recognizing that its existing website was not creating leads, the company’s leadership team knew it was time to make a change.

Diamond Vendors engaged Brodie Creative, a respected digital marketing agency that had already achieved success transitioning brick-and-mortar retailers to e-commerce driven sales environments. Therefore, Diamond Vendors looked to the historic success of Brodie Creative to deliver them a return on their investment.

The team at Brodie Creative got right to work, looking closely at the digital marketing efforts of emerging jewelry brands in the market—including Blue Nile, James Allen and Ritani, among others. Based on their comprehensive research, the South Florida marketing agency recommended a strategy that would distinguish Diamond Vendors from its competition, focusing on a local campaign strategy targeting potential customers within a 20-mile radius of the company’s brick-and-mortar location in North Miami, Florida. These users would be pushed toward scheduling a product viewing at the store.

Brodie Creative launched the strategy for the fall and winter of 2013, starting with the “grand opening” of Diamond Vendors’ new website.

Thanks to its industry expertise, the Brodie Creative team knew that funneling users to an in-store viewing eliminated a major barrier for customers—the discomfort they often feel when making large, expensive jewelry purchases online. Instead, users could browse Diamond Vendors’ diamond search tool featuring more than 700,000 loose diamonds, and then see products in person before making a decision.

However, this presented another challenge. Brodie Creative implemented wide-ranging analytics to monitor user behavior, and the team quickly noticed that about 30 out of 400 average users each month interacted with the new website, including the diamond search tool. When asked to rate the search tool, a majority gave it a score of 2 out of 5 or lower, and further analysis found that 76 percent of users who made it to the tool did not interact with it in any significant way. Only 14 percent used the tool to compare diamonds, and just 1.5 percent went on to make a purchase.

It was clear the diamond search tool needed to be improved. With only the budget for an advertising campaign, Brodie Creative needed to find a way to make adjustments to the existing tool so that ad spending would drive potential customers to a website they could actually use effectively. The design team needed to determine which features of the search tool created the most value.

Using analytics and heat mapping software, Brodie Creative tracked how users interacted with blog content that educated users on finding the perfect diamond and related topics. The team successfully found which diamond features were most relevant to customers and, leveraging this data, determined the filtering features—such as price, size, cut, clarity, and color—that users would find most helpful. This zoom-in pivot enhanced new user engagement levels to 68 percent—with a truly impressive 8.9 percent of those users making a purchase.

As the campaign launch neared, Brodie Creative conducted keyword research to ensure the improved search tool reached the optimal audience. Finding the most profitable keywords, the South Florida PPC agency was also able to identify how locals searched for diamonds—recognizing, for example, that nearly 70 percent of active searches occurred in November and December (Search Trends).

By implementing tactics like search ads, remarketing to previous customers, geo-targeting and demographic targeting, Brodie Creative as able to pinpoint ads toward users who were genuinely interested in diamonds, qualified to purchase and able to visit the store in the near future.

The new interactive diamond filter accelerated Diamond Vendors’ lead collection rate by nearly 150 percent, while also helping to prequalify users before they reached the retailer’s sales team. This optimized the sales process, as customers had typically narrowed down their options before entering the store and were more likely to follow through with a purchase.

Pay-per-click advertising efforts became profitable for the retailer within just two weeks after launch, with $400 in ad spend translating into revenue of more than $3,000 in profit. By the time the campaign ended in January 2014, we had achieved a 46 to 1 return on ad spend.

In the long term, the campaign prompted a change in the way Diamond Vendors (now known as Bashert Diamonds) approached sales. It has since moved away from brick-and-mortar sales entirely, now favoring an e-commerce approach and positioning itself solely as a jewelry company.