Braybrooke Beer Co is a growing craft lager brand that historically distributed to pubs and restaurants. When COVID-19 hit, Braybrooke was significantly impacted due to COVID restrictions and lockdowns.
To pivot their business, Braybrooke set up a basic website at the start of the initial lockdown. However, they had no website or marketing team at the time and they wanted to find a way to scale their Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) sales through their website.
Following an initial short-term project to demonstrate the opportunity DTC offers to drive a step-change in revenue and profit for the business, Entropy was selected to work with Braybrooke as a permanent retained partner. As part of this work, Entropy also developed a new Shopify website for Braybrooke and ran their digital marketing activities.
It was important for Entropy to first understand Braybrooke’s business before any substantial work could begin. To start, Entropy conducted an initial diagnostic of Braybrooke’s business to understand more about the business and ecommerce opportunity. Multiple interview sessions were held with various stakeholders and Entropy took the lead in conducting in-depth market research to deepen their knowledge of the competitive landscape.
Braybrooke’s financial lead was also brought into the discussions as Entropy understands that financials are always the core of the business. Entropy worked with the financial lead to develop their P&L clarifying net income for their key products.
Following the “discovery” period, Entropy captured all of the observations, insights, and analysis to share back with the Braybrooke team to agree on the vision and final deliverables.
Entropy’s initial discovery of Braybrooke’s business uncovered some “quick fixes” to their existing site in order to maximise the number of visitors that purchase their products (in other words, their “conversion rate”.)
Entropy also identified opportunities to run paid media campaigns to drive visitors to their site. With no paid media expertise in-house, Braybrooke entrusted Entropy to run all aspects of their digital marketing activities including paid search, Product Listing Ads (Google and Bing), and display (Facebook and Instagram). In addition to paid media, Entropy also helped launch Braybrooke’s email marketing programme. With a focus on strong relevance and creative treatment, email Open Rates were consistently above 50%, exceeding industry standards.
With the success of the digital marketing activities, Entropy was further tasked with creating a longer-term strategic plan for Braybrooke’s DTC business. The plan included customer and market research to shape Braybrooke’s future website, product, service, and marketing proposition.
After reviewing the proposed strategic plan from Entropy, Braybrooke identified 2 key initiatives that they wanted to implement right away:
Braybrooke knew both initiatives would help drive conversion and increase revenue, and both were needed to meet their forecast goals. Entropy continued to support Braybrooke on this journey, and scoped and launched their new website on Shopify offering an improved customer experience plus additional functionality and services.
A loyalty programme was developed in the form of the Braybrooke Lager Club, where subscribers received a monthly case featuring classic Braybrooke beers, seasonal brews, and guest lagers.
After 6 months of operation, Braybrooke’s Lager Club accounted for nearly 25% of its online sales demonstrating the success of subscription products. In addition, the new Shopify site allowed Braybrooke to launch a new “Build Your Own Case” (BYOC) functionality, which allowed customers to pick and mix their own case of beers with an accompanying discount. Over 20% of sales came from BYOC after the new website launched.
This is a good example of how Entropy works with businesses to show the considerable growth opportunity of ecommerce before they decide to invest further. Usually, once the business case has been demonstrated, this initial period will be followed by working with the internal team to develop their wider ecommerce strategy including their website and potentially brand strategy. Each project is bespoke, but you can read more about what is involved in our typical ecommerce approach here.
Contact us and we’d be happy to talk you through how you can scale your project through ecommerce with a limited initial investment.
Have a question? Contact us and we'd be happy to chat.
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