Restarting Growth After a Turnaround

The Situation

When Origami Owl brought me back as their Fractional Marketing Director, the company was coming out of a turnaround and a rebrand. That meant starting over in several places at once:

• Email and text audiences had to be rebuilt. The rebrand came with a new email sending domain, so I had to retrain email providers like Gmail and Outlook to deliver our emails to inboxes instead of spam.
• Ads had to learn from scratch. We had brand-new Meta and Google ad accounts with no history, so their algorithms had no data on which people were most likely to buy after seeing our ads.
• Wholesale needed to grow. Leadership wanted to build up wholesale so growth didn't depend entirely on sales from our ecommerce site.

Business Risks I Uncovered

• Cash flow. I had to win new customers and, at the same time, set up the email and text programs that earn a second purchase. We needed to earn back the cost of each new customer quickly, or growth would drain cash the business couldn't spare.
• A wholesale program that couldn't scale. Finding new wholesale accounts was labor-intensive and relied almost entirely on trade shows and events. There was no online way to capture interested retailers, teach them about the brand and turn them into wholesale customers.

Solutions I Implemented

First, I audited the full customer journey to find where people were falling through the cracks: from discovering the brand, to visiting the website, to buying, to coming back to add to their jewelry collection. Then I met with the small existing team (ecommerce, marketing and IT) to rank the fixes by effort and impact, and got the CEO's buy-in on the plan.

• Website. We made several rounds of improvements to navigation and to product and category pages. We also added landing pages for key customer groups, like a gift guide for people buying jewelry for someone else.
• Email and texts. For the first three months, I ran an email reputation recovery program to cut down on spam complaints and unsubscribes. I set up automated emails and texts to bring back shoppers who left items in their cart, and to win a second and third purchase from new customers. I grew text-message marketing from $0 to $47.5K a month in revenue by signing up far more subscribers and testing send times and message styles to turn them into buyers.
• Paid ads. I brought on an agency that specializes in helping ecommerce brands scale profitably. With our finance director, I set monthly targets for net sales, customer acquisition cost and average order value, so ads earned back their cost on the first purchase while we rapidly grew new customers.
• Wholesale. I designed a new page on our website to capture interest from retailers. Behind it, I built a follow-up system in GoHighLevel, with landing pages, sign-up forms and automated emails for prospects who visited but didn't sign up right away. I also overhauled our product listings on Faire, an online wholesale marketplace, so retailers could find and buy our products more easily.