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Growing the HipKids eCommerce Brand to an 8-figure Business

Turning playtime into serious business.

Through a robust growth strategy, a consolidation of marketing activities and a great product, we are proud to have been able to deliver a 738% growth in revenue for HipKids over a 5 year period, and scale their business to new heights. HipKids, once a small family-owned toy store, is now a multi-million dollar ecommerce powerhouse.

To find out how we did it, read the full case study below.

PERFORMANCE HIGHLIGHTS

Case study at a glance

In 2016, family-owned children’s specialty toy manufacturer HipKids came to Webprofits for a consolidated and integrated digital marketing solution that could drive scale.

To achieve this, we developed a dedicated growth team and took a channel agnostic approach, helping HipKids boost revenue rapidly through the areas that would have the biggest impact:

• Paid Media management optimisation
• Content refinement
• Improved email automation
• Streamlined Google and Facebook activities

In the first year, overall the revenue trajectory jumped by 444% (with an increase in spend of just 24%) with standout channel performers being:

• Google Ads (38X revenue increase)
• Facebook ads (22X revenue increase)
• Email marketing (11X revenue increase).

For the full story, read on…

THE CHALLENGEOnline marketing was working, but increasingly fragmented

Seeing that their online marketing activities and multiple agency partnerships were becoming increasingly fragmented and harder to manage, HidKids needed a consolidated, integrated solution that could help them to scale.

After a comprehensive audit of HipKids’ agency structure, data/results, campaigns and website, we identified a
number of key issues we needed to fix, including:

• The fragmented agency approach
• Unprofitable advertising campaigns
• Poor mobile user experience
• Manual email marketing
• Declining Organic/SEO Traffic

THE APPROACHFirst step – what does success look like?

After consulting with the team, we determined that the success for HipKids was to deliver YoY revenue growth of 15% while maintaining a 6X ROAS.

One team

To negate the fragmentation issue, we created an internal growth team for HipKids with an appointed senior eCommerce specialist and a team of digital marketing experts whose experience covered every channel required to achieve success. No account managers, just elite marketers doing the work themselves.

With one team, we built robust digital funnels and utilised every resource we created across all channels which maximised the ROI generated from our efforts.

The Webprofits HipKids growth team, provided the experience required to drive scale on the most important channels.

Channel agnostic ‘Fluid Marketing’ approach

Our channel agnostic approach, allowed us to keep an open mind and find new opportunities beyond what was currently being done by asking, “What else could we do and how could we do things even better?”.

Key strategies included:

Starting with where HipKids could win fast, we identified the products that presented the greatest opportunity for growth and these became were our initial focus.

• The implementation of a Smart Shopping campaign was able to increase revenue in Google Ads by 106% YoY.
• After reviewing and rebuilding the Email automation and marketing campaigns running on Klaviyo, email revenue increased by 1,178%.

We significantly improved the mobile design of every email increasing conversion rate by 241%

• Following the change in mobile design, we wrote, designed, and developed a series of automated emails, triggered by customer behaviour.

Automated welcome emails.

• These automated emails welcomed people to the database, gave them a free gift to encourage initial or repeat purchase, and introduced them to HipKids’ brand, outlining the most popular categories, products, and website content. We also improved the abandoned cart recovery sequence design and messaging to increase purchases.

Improved abandoned cart recovery sequence design and messaging.

• We applied our strategic approach, experience and tools to spin up, scale and optimise paid search and paid social campaigns at speed. Leveraging our position as a Google Premium Partner and Facebook Preferred Partner we were able to utilise a range of betas, optimisation tools and other resources to further improve campaigns to drive huge returns.
• • Social revenue from Facebook campaigns grew by 2,231% YOY.
  • Revenue tracked from Google Ads has increased by +3,886.27%
    
• By taking advantage of new ad creative available through Google Ads, such as the Premier Partner exclusive early access to Google’s Performance Max campaign type, we were able to leverage the latest AI to serve customised copy to Search audiences:

• On the website, we utilised conversion rate optimisation (CRO) to ensure that every click from Adwords and other channels, had the highest possibility of converting into a sale, regardless of device.
• We also undertook a comprehensive CRO Audit utilising quantitative data from Google Analytics, and qualitative data from screen recording and surveys utilising Hot Jar. Key areas we improved included:
• • Improved checkout process
  • Site speed issues fixed
  • Mobile user experience improved
  • Category + Product Page layout issues

THE IMPACT

Immediate growth spurt

In the first year of our working with HipKids:

• Overall revenue increased by 444% YOY from Aug-Oct 2017, with only a 24% increase in ad spend.
• Social revenue from Facebook campaigns grew by 2,231% YOY.

Continued revenue growth of up to 38X since 2016

Between 2017 and 2021:

• Revenue tracked from Google Ads has increased by +3,886%
• Revenue for Facebook Ads activity has scaled 2,138%
• Email Marketing revenue has increased by 1,178%
• ROAS has been between 6.50 and 11.00 depending on the month (due to seasonal business with
  higher performance in the last quarter of the calendar year).
• Overall business revenue has scaled 738%*

We helped HipKids, now we can help you. If you’re keen to get your eCommerce or DTC brand to double-digit revenue, let’s talk.

^*Note, we acknowledge the other factors which also influenced the growth of HipKids since 2016:

• Website SEO and revamp: we managed the website SEO up until 2020, when a new site was launched which streamlined the user experience and increased conversion rates and revenue across all channels.

• HipKids manage their own PR campaigns which could have generated further search and website traffic.

• There is no doubt that COVID contributed to revenue growth from 2020 – 2021.

Alex Cleanthous

Director of Strategy + Innovation at Webprofits

Alex Cleanthous is an entrepreneur, writer, technologist, and marketing leader. He is Co-Founder of Webprofits, Australia’s largest private digital consultancy. With more than 20 years experience in the digital space, Alex stays at the forefront of digital innovation, strategy, and execution identifying new markets, platforms, and tools to keep pace with the exponential expansion of technology.