R.A.G. New York

Objectives

The owner of the R.A.G. New York Clothing store (est 1959), Jason Greenstein, came to Blue Fountain Media with a desire to grow the family business online. At the time, the 5-branch store had a small website that was difficult to find. We provided him with an ecommerce website that has become one of the company's major income generators thanks to online marketing.

Methodology

The Blue Fountain Media website planning team started by interviewing the client, assessing requirements, and proposing solutions. One of the many findings that came out of this process was that much of R.A.G.'s sales resulted from NYC souvenir clothing such as the famous "I Love NY" t-shirts worn by one out of every five tourists who come the Big Apple. We made sure to have a section dedicated to these items. At the end of the planning phase, we had a complete blue print for the website, which both designers and developers could rely upon while building the website.

Our design team took on the project and started by creating various home page mockups, of which one was chosen by the client, based on our recommendations. From the chosen home page design, sub pages were created. Every page fulfilled key requirements of designing an effective website:

• Clear messaging.
• Strong, relevant calls-to-action.
• Stickiness features to bring people back to the website.

The Blue Fountain Media development team built a custom content management system, which allowed for 3rd party integration and customer relations management. The R.A.G. staff can control the quantity of products, weight, colors, additional product views, related products, and featured products on the home page. The system allows our SEO team complete flexibility to edit website meta data, URLs, and search engine crawl parameters.

After the website launched, our online marketing team started the search engine optimization process. After six months of SEO, the website was on page 1 of Google and other search engines for over 80 keywords. Keywords such as "plaid shorts" were sending traffic directly to targeted landing pages, which resulted in extremely high conversion rates. Traffic and sales have continued to increase since the site launched in early 2008.

Email marketing has since become another main channel of revenue for the website as seasonal campaigns send customers promotional codes and special deals on R.A.G. products.

Results

The relaunch of the R.A.G. website had an immediate impact on the company's sales. Through social media marketing and search engine optimization, the website saw rapid growth in the 2 years since it's launch and continues to increase in traffic and revenue.

The results were astounding enough that the website was featured in the New York Daily News in 2009.

• Traffic has increased exponentially since the website launch in early 2008.
• Conversion rates have improved through optimization, about 2.5 times better from previously.
• Cost-per-acquisition has gone down to less than 20 cents per sale.