Introduction
It’s been almost 7 years since Finch Goods Co. has been launched and they consist of a curated section of men’s goods and their lifestyle products. This startup e-commerce company very quickly denoted into fame through their quality products and their traditional marketing strategy which aimed bigger at the return business.
Over the last few years and months, Richard Lazazzera, the founder of the company had primarily worked on redefining the e-commerce brand and there what Finch Goods stands for. He had also curated new products, stabilized a solid rock like marketing foundation for his site and tested the waters of various marketing channels and tried to determine the future direction.
The Hardest Challenges
For each and every business, they face their unique challenges and then overcome them and learn from them and also Finch Goods is not an exception to that. The substantial challenges of Finch Goods can be differentiated into two, almost similar categories:
Curation: Finch goods depend on curation. They curate the best out of all in men’s accessories, choosing the best style, quality and value. That is their unique value proposition. Haphazardly choosing a product leaves them at risk of holding the inventory which they can’t get rid of and the worst part is that damaging the brand so that people think of Finch Goods and think to recommend others, this is the level they wanted Finch Goods to be on. All of this sums up to a large commitment.
Supplier Relationships: Commencing, building and managing lots of supplier relationships are difficult tasks. The first stage is the contact stage where they need to contact those suppliers whose products they are considering to open up with, then to find out more about their references, their products, minimum orders and wholesale prices. Few of them replied very easily, some of them replied after few weeks and some of them never ever replied back. Once it is done, there are usually a few more emails to send back and forth to get the details. Managing all these back and forth emails gets complicated.
To build a Rigid Marketing Foundation
Finch goods brands have spent a lot of time building a rock-solid marketing execution. They thought of e-commerce stores as a bucket. It usually takes a lot of time and money to fill that bucket with water (web traffic). The problem is if the bucket has many holes in it the water leaks out.
6 E-Commerce Elements to plug the E-Commerce Bucket Holes
There are six elements that are considered being critical to addressing before spending a huge amount of money and energy on marketing and especially on paid marketing. These six elements are:
- Promoting at checkout
- Email encapsulation or newsletter signup
- Deserted cart emails
- Referrals
- Exit-purpose offers
- Retargeting
Customer Retention Strategy
It is a saying that it is easier to get past customers who purchase again and again than to find a new customer. Knowing this the brand has implemented many tactics to keep their customer retention.
1. Customer Accounts
Customer accounts are a double-edged sword; on one hand, accounts can be made where repurchasing is much easier by providing customers with easy access to past orders and pre-filled shipping orders. On the other hand, customer accounts are seen as too big of a commitment for new customers. Due to this most of the customers’ login as a guest. And this brand has given the power to the customers to view their page as a guest without creating an account at first.
2. Loyalty Program for Customers
Finch goods took the idea of rewarding their customers from the brand Loyalty Lion like how they give points, credits and rewards to their customers. Like that Finch goods give rewards to the customers if they share their references on Twitter.
3. Frequently Sending their Customer Newsletter Emails
To keep an engagement in their email list they share offers and sales of their curated products to their customers. They schedule their emails weekly so that every week the customers get an offer or sale about their new products every Sunday.
4. Surprise & Gifts
Every time they get a chance they fill their customers with surprises or gifts. This includes just a small handwritten card or maybe an additional gift with a huge purchase. They sometimes just send gifts to their customers without any purpose to thank them.
They believe in the law of reciprocity which means to respond to positive action in exchange for another positive action. This helped them to gain their customers and to repurchase from them every time. Also, this action helped them a lot in gaining customer reviews at their site and that helped in word-of-mouth marketing.
Accounting
Accounting is a necessary process. Knowing the numbers can assuredly make or break one’s business. For the first few months, the company didn’t keep any accounting track because they thought it was less important at that time. They considered sales as the more important thing than the business. After a few months they saw that things started to get messy. They spent a lot on their inventory, shipping, marketing, and packaging but they didn’t know how much they were spending. Then they started accounting.
They chose a few options among which some were paid and few were for free. The list is in the following:-
Sage
Xero
Kashoo
Freshbooks
Quickbooks
Brand Evolution
They believed Finch good is organic and it will change over time. Over the last few months, Finch Goods has continued to evolve its positioning which they have better understood that the niche they are in. After 6 months they found out the right position for Finch Goods among their sea of competitors.
Social Media
Their social media handle which was in their case was Instagram was quite active which they found out later and added that in the report.
How Finch Goods grow their business
Growing an online e-commerce business is not an easy task. It really takes a lot of time, testing, execution, testing, tweaking. Initially, they stabilized well and then they started to zero in on their brands and their direction. Over the few months, they had few growth tactics which is described as follows:-
Own Products
New Product Catalogues
Channel Popup
Choosing the Best Marketing Channels
Search Engine Optimization
Product Pictures
Conclusion
A lot of wheels turned in their background starting from their conversion expansion to marketing than to accounting as well as operations; they build everything slowly according to them. They realized that starting a business takes time. They had to do hundreds of things that were organic starting from maintaining and stabilizing. After all this Finch goods came into the limelight at the marketplace.
