West Marine, Inc. (NASDAQ: WMAR)
Case Study
OverviewWest Marine has more than 400 West Marine stores and Boat U.S. Marine Centers in 38 states, Puerto Rico and Canada. The company carries more than 100,000 products, from the rope that started it all to the latest in marine electronics. In addition to its retail stores and Port Supply wholesale divisions, the company serves boaters in more than 150 countries worldwide through its mail-order and Internet divisions.
While West Marine already had a comprehensive and diversified online marketing program, there was a potentially untapped area that could help it achieve additional exposure and revenue on the Web.
Objectives
With more than 60,000 online products for sale, West Marine wanted to ensure that time-sensitive data in its search listings (e.g. new products) stayed up-to-date.
In addition, West Marine did not want to exchange "data dumps" with third parties to achieve this goal. To confirm West Marine's analytics and tracking software, BeyondROI wanted independent tracking of visitors, conversions and Return on Advertising Spending (ROAS) statistics for comparative purposes.
Solution
West Marine partnered with BeyondROI to collaborate on, test and implement our powerful Yahoo! Search Submit Pro service. After a meeting of the minds, BeyondROI thoroughly and seamlessly crawled West Marine's site to gather relevant data for inclusion.
The initial test strategy was to select a limited number of categories and competitive product pages to be indexed for this product offering. West Marine wanted to focus on hot market categories and their products, such as electronics, navigation, water sports and apparel.
BeyondROI developed a consistent messaging pattern with strong calls to action for these categories and specific products, page by page. The final (and critical) element of pre-campaign configuration was West Marine's implementation of BeyondROI's tracking codes to validate visitors, conversions, sales and ROAS statistics.
Results
An initial week-long test showed that:
- For every dollar spent on advertising, West Marine earned 16 times more in gross revenues than it spent on advertising for this campaign.
- All relevant pages submitted to Yahoo! were indexed.
- West Marine experienced enhanced control over messaging and targeting.
After concluding the test and reviewing the data, West Marine fully engaged the service. Ongoing adjustments are made to their feeds based on search and conversion metrics.
Now the focus is on:
- Optimizing broad and specific hot market merchandise.
- Crawling the site and updating its index to maintain freshness of products and services.
- Emphasizing seasonal products and promotions.
- Monitoring effectiveness to increase specific and overall ROAS (now at 20 times more in gross sales than dollars spent on advertising for this campaign).
West Marine has filled a gap in its already comprehensive online marketing plan, while simultaneously maintaining their overall business objectives.