Case Study—The Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club

The Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club has an amazing story to tell—T.J. Robinson, known as The Olive Oil Hunter, travels the world four times a year to wherever the olives are in-season and ripe for pressing. He visits numerous olive farms each trip, tasting and assessing which oils are worthy of this quarter's club shipment. And each quarter, three carefully curated taste experiences are raced by jet plane to the US before being delivered to club members at peak freshness.

CHALLENGE

Before engaging Wield, The Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club had built a healthy business around quarterly shipments of super-premium, extra-virgin olive oils, shipped to club members direct from small, in-season farms located in prime olive-growing regions throughout the world. They had built their success by creating relationships with a sizable array of affiliates and influencers, as well as a methodical approach to testing and experimenting with their messaging. The vast majority of their marketing resources went to highly effective affiliate email efforts, supplemented with a small quantity of lackluster paid media. However, as time went on, they plateaued and struggled to grow further. Affiliate audiences became well-saturated and response began to fatigue. The club was faced with a need to broaden its marketing strategy and diversify into multiple channels. Wield was brought on board to plan and execute.

STRATEGY

Wield started by learning the nuances of where the business model and club members intersect. While new member signups are the broader goal, we wanted to garner success by identifying the club’s best customers (long term members) and building an audience profile based on those most valuable members. With this profile in hand, we then developed a strategy of when, where, and how we would connect with new customers. Furthermore, we determined which technologies we’d need to implement and deploy in order to support our strategy and create tailored experiences to best captivate, and convert our target audience.

With their compelling story and campaign messaging, focusing on the taste and health benefits of truly fresh olive oil, needed to be the through-line connecting all channels. A content focused marketing strategy was a natural fit—delivered by sourcing Display ads on select premium publishers through major content discovery networks, as well as extensive cross-channel paid and organic search (SEO) and social.

“First, they took the necessary time to understand our business. They also profiled our best customers so they could find lots more of them online. We love their approach of testing small and inexpensively until they refine the right strategy to bring us a dependable stream, and then a river, of new and well-qualified customers. Once they identify a winning strategy, they scale it up methodically and carefully, with a watchful eye on our marketing ROI. They make everything transparent in crystal-clear reports that show exactly what they are doing, where our new customers are coming from, their cost of acquisition, conversion rate, and repeat sales revenue. This means that the funds we invest in marketing are not shots in the dark but profitable investments with measurable ROI. As a result of all this, we are experiencing outstanding and consistent sales growth we could not have achieved without Wield.”
—Gary Bencivenga, Author, Marketing Bullets, and Partner, Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club

APPROACH

Achieving scale on the major content discovery networks, Taboola and Outbrain, requires a strong mobile presence. This is rapidly becoming more applicable for other channels as well. The client’s sales funnels were a bit dated and not ideally suited for converting mobile traffic. Our new strategy would see us getting 80%+ of our traffic from mobile visitors, and therefore, rebuilding key landing pages and funnels—for an improved mobile experience—was critical.

We built up a variety of content pieces, each telling the client’s story, while testing several different sales angles. Each content piece guided the user towards the member signup funnel. We then directed, with tailored ad messaging, intentionally (re)targeted traffic to this content, from a wide array of channels including Taboola, Outbrain, Google, Facebook, Instagram and many more. This effort was supported with ongoing placement of organic social content as well.

Wield also managed a series of emails as part of a campaign to target former members, incentivizing them to rejoin the club.

CONCLUSION

Within a year, the Fresh-Pressed Olive Oil Club was gaining as many new member signups from Wield’s diversified efforts as the amount they receive from affiliate email and influencers. The campaigns are still progressing on an upward trajectory with aggressive quarter-over-quarter growth. By partnering with Wield, and implementing a strategy that diversifies efforts across multiple channels FPOO is scaling and has already achieved a 17.2% net increase in club size. This is despite a decrease in signups from the affiliate email sources on which it has been so dependent. With Wield’s updates to signup funnels and mobile experience, conversion rates have increased on traffic across the board. Additionally, both traffic and signups from organic search and social have increased dramatically.

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