W3 Affinity started digital marketing efforts for Pick a Bloom in November of 2015.

Pick a Bloom set out to sell wedding flowers online with a Shopify website and wanted to be disruptors by bringing a product that had a negative connotation for being “Fake” and “Dead looking” in their industry to the spotlight due to its actual beauty and longevity over their competitors’ products online.

Pick a Bloom faced a very uphill battle for the spotlight in a very crowded wedding industry. They brought W3 Affinity on board as the experts in both Shopify Development and SEO.

We’d already won in the front of content and SEO and sales were just not coming in the way that was hoped to grow the company. We needed a new way of generating leads and it needed to be at a low budget to keep the companies overhead down.

Our solution was clear, it was going to take a creative approach to how we FIND & CONVERT leads.

The strategy we set forward had multiple layers that needed to be executed on and it had to be done quickly and effectively.

Here were the ingredients to our successful strategy:

• We needed a target, for Pick a Bloom, it was pretty easy to determine.
• We needed a value-add, or hook, to get their users to convert into a lead
  • Enter the Calculator – we developed a custom calculator that told the bride low/med/high costs of flowers
• We needed automation to link the calculator to an email marketing software.
  • We picked Zapier for the webhook
  • Zapier for the email box
  • Active Campaign for marketing automation
• We developed Active Campaign to have a list that every calculator lead would drip into
• We needed to make a laundry list of emails in sequence to guide their leads down the buyer’s journey
• We needed to form custom audiences for advertising based on the leads coming in.

To put it all together, we determined our target and delivered advertising to them allowing them to answer a key question in their journey to get married. The tool took off as a standard for the budget determination as its data was unbiased in its answering. Every lead who was added to a custom audience as we knew they were interested in the services of our client and also added to an email drip campaign.

Based on our known time to convert for users that ultimately purchased from Pick a Bloom, we were able to develop an email campaign that dripped several emails to the user while new ads went out that supported sales, product awareness, and brand recognition.

We had developed a unique way to generate leads and keep the costs down, the results were impressive.

We keep looking back as a typical cost per conversion was around $1.50-$4.00 at this level of the buyer’s journey. We had reduced the cost tremendously and it has held over the months of this campaign. The secret to this success was the initial research stage. We took the time to know who the user was and how we should reach them. The platform was Facebook Ads. We sought after very high-quality scores to ensure we kept costs down.

That isn’t a typo. The custom order requests went up 500% from the efforts we had set forward. Custom Order requests are the highest value sale that Pick a Bloom has to offer, and the most fun as it stretches their creative genes.

Driving sales was the final goal of this exercise. The lead generation was to feed the beast while keeping budgets managed.

We can call this a success that we continue to execute for other clients daily.