At Simul Digital, we are privileged to partner with businesses that are passionate, driven, and determined to make a positive impact on their industry. One such partner was Natural Thrive, a family-owned business based in the Midlands, set on a mission to introduce natural and organic supplements to a broad audience.

The health and wellness market they ventured into was crowded, teeming with numerous competitors all vying for attention. This fact, however, only bolstered their resolve, and with Simul at their side, they dared to dream big.

Conceptualising a Unique Identity: The Genesis of a Brand

The journey of Natural Thrive is a testimony to what can be achieved when creativity, innovation, and deep industry insight merge. It was a fast-paced, exhilarating project, spearheaded by our dedicated team.

We worked in close collaboration with the business owner, over a number of brand and business workshops aiming to grasp their vision in its entirety. It was these insights that allowed us to transform their aspirations into a tangible brand, one capable of capturing the hearts of consumers.

Visual aspects of a brand play a pivotal role in customer perception, often serving as the first interaction point between the brand and potential customers. Being well aware of this vital factor, we centred our efforts on the creation of engaging, attractive labelling. We also carefully curated a palette of vibrant colours that perfectly encapsulated Natural Thrive’s commitment to natural and organic supplements.

Style and tone were equally crucial in this creative journey. We chose a style that reflected simplicity and vitality, resonating with the essence of natural elements. The result was a harmonious blend of aesthetics and ethos, breathing life into the Natural Thrive brand.

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Designing a Digital Persona: Crafting the Online Presence of Natural Thrive

With the foundation of the brand firmly established, our attention shifted to the task of designing and constructing the digital face of Natural Thrive. We were tasked with creating an e-commerce platform where the brand could showcase and sell its extensive product range.

Leveraging Content Strategy and SEO Power: Building a Strong Online Presence

Once the website launch was successful, our strategic focus pivoted to the creation of a robust content strategy. The goal was to enhance the website’s organic visibility by crafting engaging blog posts and other forms of valuable content. This wealth of high-quality, enriching content was designed not only to engage existing customers but also to draw in potential customers exploring the health and wellness sector.

Simultaneously, we leveraged both organic and paid search strategies to drive significant traffic from day one. This dual approach was instrumental in building a formidable online presence for Natural Thrive, even in the fiercely competitive health and wellness market. It wasn’t just about getting visitors to the site; we were focused on attracting those genuinely interested in what Natural Thrive had to offer.

Educating the Market: An Insight into Natural Thrive’s Diverse Product Range

One of the fundamental aspects that sets Natural Thrive apart from its competitors is its diverse range of health and wellness products. Our team at Simul played a crucial role in bridging the gap between the brand and its customers, helping to educate them about this broad product spectrum.

Natural Thrive offers a wide array of products, including Powder Supplements, Organic Fruit Powders, Organic Supplements, Mushroom Supplements, and Loose-Leaf Tea. Each of these product categories was designed to cater to the various health and wellness needs of their customers.

Powder Supplements and Organic Fruit Powders serve as a convenient and versatile source of essential nutrients. These products are easy to incorporate into daily diets and offer a multitude of health benefits, including immune support, energy boost, and overall well-being.

The Organic Supplements range extends the philosophy of ‘natural and organic’ beyond food. These products are crafted to supplement the nutritional needs of the customers, promoting a healthy lifestyle using ingredients that are both organic and sustainable.

Mushroom Supplements have grown in popularity due to their potential health benefits, including immunity boosting, cognitive function support, and anti-inflammatory properties. Natural Thrive’s Mushroom Supplements are made from potent mushroom extracts, ensuring the highest quality and efficacy.

Loose Leaf Tea is a classic health beverage, known for its detoxifying properties and rich antioxidant content. Natural Thrive offers a variety of loose-leaf teas, each one with its unique taste and health benefits.

By creating compelling and informative content around these products, Simul was able to elucidate their benefits, helping customers make informed decisions about their health and wellness journey. The goal was not just to sell a product, but to educate customers on the holistic benefits these products provide, and how they could seamlessly incorporate them into their lifestyles for improved health and wellbeing.

This endeavour of educating the market not only served to enhance the Natural Thrive brand’s reputation but also built a loyal customer base that appreciates the brand’s commitment to quality, transparency, and the health of its customers.

We believe that an informed customer is a satisfied customer. By aligning our strategies with this belief, we helped Natural Thrive carve out a niche in the crowded health and wellness industry.

Delivering Results at Lightning Speed

The journey from brand creation to digital launch was a swift one, an accomplishment made possible by the collaborative efforts of our team and the client. The fruits of our labour were immediately apparent, with a 180% growth in conversions and a boost in online visibility by over 500%.

This exceptional growth wasn’t just an indicator of how the project had been swiftly executed, but also a testament to its effectiveness. Chris Alan, Director of Natural Thrive, encapsulated this sentiment perfectly when he said, “It has been a pleasure working with Simul Digital on launching our brand… We’re thrilled with the final result! We look forward to growing our e-commerce website with them.”

Uncover the Natural Thrive Journey in More Detail

We invite you to delve deeper into the Natural Thrive project. Our comprehensive case study offers a detailed exploration of the project, complete with a range of images and additional information.

At Simul, we are passionate about turning visions into reality. If you’re prepared to take your brand to unprecedented heights, reach out to us today and let’s embark on a journey together.

As the weather warms up and Summer is in full swing, here at Simul Digital we’re excited to announce the launch of a brand new partnership which will elevate our email marketing services and capability for clients.

We’ve joined forces with Klaviyo, world leaders in email marketing and comms automation. Established in 2012, Klaviyo believes in the power of data and technology to measure, track and record to optimise campaigns, drive sales and improve loyalty. 

By harnessing this data in the right way, we’re beginning to see some excellent growth among many of our ecommerce clients.

We’ve been hunting for a new comms provider for a while, having supported clients across several industry leading platforms, but never found the perfect fit for both service and capability.

Now several weeks into our partnership with Klaviyo, we have seamlessly integrated our clients’ systems and are well underway managing marketing & service email comms, tracking customer interactions, running triggered sales campaigns and leveraging cart abandonment opportunities to secure additional sales for clients.

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This partnership has really enabled us to deliver more for our clients by harnessing the power of Klaviyo’s world leading technology.

Just a few of the new features and capabilities that Klaviyo brings to our email marketing services include:

• Dynamic Data-based Communication: The advanced data-handling aspects that Klaviyo brings, means we are able to optimise marketing content based on recipient attributes and behaviour. This means that we can ensure customers are receiving comms about what they are interested in, searching for and buying to get the best performance from our marketing comms, all dynamically generated and updated in real-time, according to user behaviour.
  
  
• Total Broadcast Control: Offering ultimate flexibility in sending emails & customer communications. We can increase the likelihood of comms being opened and engaged with, as we can dynamically optimise broadcast time to maximise performance through the use of automated tracking and measurement.  Less worrying about ‘the right time to send’, when we know exactly when our comms best perform to recipients.
  
  
• Surprise & Delight Opportunities: With better handling and management of data come more opportunities to surprise and delight customers.  We’re now much better equipped to launch last minute special offers, sales, customer rewards and loyalty promotions, which is becoming essential for many of our clients. We can also support better things like tailored sends based on buying patterns, as well as birthday and anniversary offer emails which customers love. 
  
  
• Advanced Creative Capabilities: When it comes to designing, building and testing email content, Klaviyo is a leader, with seamless systems meaning that email creative and build is more efficient to build and easier to manage.  This can be a critical issue in some systems, and we’ve been very impressed when working on Klaviyo’s platform.

Though we’re only a few months into our brand new partnership, we’re seeing improved performance already across the board for those clients we have brought on board to manage their automated comms and email marketing.

If you want to learn more about how we can elevate your email marketing and customer comms to the next level, or see how we can deliver digital success for your business, get in touch today and let’s see how we can help.

Loyalty schemes have been around for many years, in different formats for both web stores and your typical high street shops.

The concept is simple: when a customer purchases a product, they are rewarded with points or tokens which are redeemable in a variety of ways.

We’re seeing these schemes become increasingly popular this year, it feels like almost every time you can make a purchase in a shop or cafe, there are points to collect and enjoy. We’re taking a brief look into the impact these schemes have on customers buying decisions and the potential financial impacts they have on businesses.

Loyalty programs have grown increasingly more popular amongst customers over the last 30 years, more so in the last decade for online ecommerce stores.

Some online sources suggest that upwards of 80% of customers UK wide are using or have used loyalty schemes which have impacted their buying decision & 91% of those surveyed also say they use more than one.

In recent months, we’ve built a few loyalty & reward programmes ourselves, implementing them seamlessly onto client websites – one of the most successful has been My Hair & Beauty Perks, which has seen resounding success with strong adoption amongst their customers.

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The Benefits of Loyalty Programmes

There are some amazing benefits for both customers and business owners to reap from loyalty programmes:

For Customers

• Discounts on products that they are interested in and enjoy
• Freebies offered to reward loyalty and make them feel appreciated
• Exclusive offers to tempt additional purchases or product ranges not normally bought

For Businesses

• Increased Customer Retention, as they grow their account balance with repeat purchases
• Increased New Customer Acquisition through Referral programs and opportunities to earn
• Data Acquisition – Customer info on buying patterns and preferences to support marketing
• Increased Product throughput to ensure a good flow of stock sold
• Higher Cart values from point and reward thresholds being set

Loyalty programs can provide some major benefits for both customers and businesses.

A very popular and successful loyalty programme that is somewhat ingrained into the everyday, and one that you may not even consider to be a loyalty programme is the Tesco Clubcard.

At the time of writing, the statistics for Tesco’s loyalty scheme shows around 20 million active sign ups and on average 80% of these registered users scan their card at checkout.

There is no clear indication into how much this card impacts the loyalty of Tesco’s customers, but you can’t hide from the fact that one of the UK’s leading supermarkets use this system as one of their core marketing functionalities.

The Drawbacks of Loyalty Programmes

There are more advantages of these systems out there, but there are also some key disadvantages too:

For Customers

• Relinquishing personal information to further marketing practices.
• Price inflation of products to counteract the offers being pushed.
• FOMO – feeling pressured to spend in shops where points are earned, not missing out on benefits

For Businesses

• Reduction In ROI from supplying ‘free’ products (some programs put daily limits in place to cap points earned)
• Investment needed to Manage Programmes, including software/app, data and managing redemptions.
• Target Audience Shift – change in customers buying or switching down to get maximum points with minimum spend.
• Highly Saturated Market – with so many offering programmes you must offer strong rewards to win sales

The biggest negative impact here seems to be for businesses where some owners are seeing a highly saturated system with offerings seemingly more and more out of reach.

They are seeing the quality of their customer base drop and a reduction of overall ROI due to the additional expense of managing these programmes and a reduction in sales due to price increases which no longer line up with the competition.

The Effectiveness of Loyalty Programmes

You can’t hide from the data that is easily soured across the web suggesting that these systems seemingly work and they may, just note that we are human after all and we are very much price driven. These schemes draw in an audience that typically falls under the class of a bargain shopper which also makes you question the name “Loyalty Program”.

Are we really loyal to the Brand or to the program? It is our belief that customers are truly loyal to brands not based on their programs but to how much we relate to their ethics and practices.

We are in an ever changing world where we are more environmentally conscious and look to purchase from companies who care about what we also care about as individuals.

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In Summary

For Businesses, these programmes can work out very well, but companies have to pay attention to the data. If they don’t have a grip of the key data points, programmes like these can easily run away, loyalty programmes have so much to offer in more ways than just direct revenue.

Question yourself, Price or Points? Does Loyalty Truly mean loyalty?

For Customers, look after your data as businesses who are savvy enough know how to play the system very well. During registration of these programmes companies state what their intentions are with your data and usually there is nothing sinister really going on here but it’s always good to be careful.

If you’re looking for a bargain and you are looking to support a business for a long period of time then these programmes can benefit you in numerous ways. Just remember that sometimes you may actually be paying more than a competitor for a similar product. 

We would love to hear your thoughts and opinions on loyalty programmes, tell us what you think on Twitter & LinkedIn – find our social links below.

Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) has caused somewhat of a frantic response amongst the email marketing community. It has changed the way email marketing campaigns are conducted, ultimately leaving businesses and agencies left scratching their heads. 

Whilst it was more of a myth at one point in time, MPP is now a reality for all email marketers. If you are new to email marketing or are just looking to refine your understanding then read on to find out more about Mail Privacy Protection. 

Email marketing is a powerful channel to grow your businesses revenue and online notoriety. Don’t be put off by it, as once you have a reliable email marketing system in place, emails become an asset in your marketing plan.

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What exactly is MPP?

How does this affect digital marketing?

Data within marketing is a currency and a highly valuable one at that. Whether it’s data on sales, social media or email responses, these data and performance metrics can really help brands and businesses plan for the future and to optimise current campaigns set live. 

The MPP update impacted email metrics for email marketers and the overall results from campaign efforts. No longer were you able to track hidden pixels to measure open rates and which type of devices are being used. It also made it harder for locations to be tracked.

As a result of MPP being brought out, things like recency management, data hygiene and journey automation have been further affected. All 3 of these are reliant on open rates being tracked which has been a foundation of email marketing for over 15 years.

Furthermore, marketers were now having to be aware of which users were viewing their emails through Apple Mail and if they were opting into MPP. 

Luckily as time has progressed Email Service Providers such as MailChimp have worked hard to accommodate Apple’s MPP – though no solution is foolproof, and metrics do still fall through the gaps.

Ways to combat the MPP updates…

This update has been out for over 2 years now. It is important though to understand how to work around Apple’s updates without compromising your businesses email marketing efforts.

After all, it can be possible to have 66% of your conversions come through email marketing if done so correctly and consistently.

There’s lots of information around the web from many email providers that will help you join the dots with your email marketing results, though there still isn’t a concrete solution.  Some brands are using other KPI’s to track performance, and moving away from traditional metrics.

Some tips to consider:

• Have your customers tell you themselves their location and device. Get creative with this one so it doesn’t seem intrusive. 
• How you measure email success can be altered – open rates aren’t meaning much due to the MPP update so think what else can be used? Website actions still remain full trackable, and present lots of options for measurement.
• Make yourself aware of who is using Apple Mail on your list if you can.
• Update customer journeys and email automations to reflect the impact MPP is having on your outcomes.

Our Closing Thoughts

Here at Simul Digital we have become accustomed to this new industry update.  When looking into GDPR and data safeguarding, the laws and norms were bound to change. Following the continued implementation of cookie consent laws, it was unlikely that hidden pixel tracking with unconfirmed consent was going to last much longer.

Digital Marketing trends and techniques never stay still, and marketers should look at what has been placed in front of them and adapt accordingly, this is what this industry is all about after all!

Many people have reported their user experience being damaged since the updates on Apple Mail. Users will transfer back over to their email providers platform making this MPP update less detrimental to marketing efforts. Metrics can be tracked easier if this happens. 

Got a project in mind? Our team of digital specialists are here to help! Book in a call with us and let us know your current and/or future plans. We will become an extension of your business, and with our proven success we’d love to work with you. 

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If you want to learn more, or see how we can deliver digital success for your business, get in touch today and let’s see how we can help.

A few weeks ago, Yandex has fell victim to a code breach which has led to some of their SEO ranking secrets to be unearthed to the general public.

For a bit of context on Yandex, they are a new search engine used in Russia. In 2022, 64% of Russians were using Yandex, with the remaining 36% using Google to browse the web.

Yandex technically is actually more useful than Google to those living in and around Russia. Some of the services it offers include:

• Marketplace
• Taxi service
• Cloud
• Travel
• Alice (similar to Siri)

Below we look further into the proprietary source code leaks and how we can learn from them for SEO marketing efforts. 

What was leaked?

In the closing days of January, those within marketing became aware of Yandex being compromised by hackers. 

The code was published online, which included a total of 1,900 individual ranking factors were found within. A large number for sure, but one that will be an eye opener to marketers going forward. 

Alex Burak has broken them down via a Twitter feed with lots of useful information.

They are links to the full source code included, along with comment and opinion on knowledge around these recent events. We’ve summarised some of the key points below.

Domain Authority

One of the first notable discoveries is that domain authority has a direct impact on SEO and browser ranking. 

This might not come as any surprise, as DA is a common metric used worldwide across the industry – it’s nice to see it confirmed for Yandex though. Having people link back to your website’s content is a clear indication of strong and reputable websites.

Website traffic metrics affect search ranking

Those who use Pay Per Click advertising be wary, as it appears that organic traffic and it’s % landing on your site affects ranking. 

This has long been rumoured, with Google Analytics providing Google with full traffic information about your site, many have postured that it’s taken as ranking factor to determine the value and experience a website offers. Though we can’t confirm it is the case for Google, it’s clear from the Yandex leak that general traffic metrics do play a part in their search rankings.

Having organic traffic is more valuable and worthwhile for your search ranking. Better still you are more likely to have repeat visitors through organic search channels, typically resulting in long-term positive outcome for Yandex’s ranking decision.

URL Structure and contents

Two things regarding URLs were uncovered from this hack.

Including numbers in your web page’s URL is detrimental to search ranking. Keep it simple it seems, and plain english / natural language word are always better than using numbers.

The second thing regarding URL structure is including forward slashes. Whilst they are good for breaking up info, try not overuse them.

Backlinking and internal linking

Another SEO fundamental has been touched upon. This time with linking back to your website. 

But which way works best for ranking, back or internal?

It works out that gaining backlinks from main webpages is more valuable than internal links. This is the backbone of many successful SEO campaigns, so it’s reassuring to have this detail confirmed.

Does this affect Google rankings?

With how closely related Yandex is to Google many have been quick to jump the gun with these recent source code leaks. 

They are obviously different products that share similar characteristics. Whilst these leaked pieces of information do not relate to Google, it’s important to have these in mind for your future SEO efforts. 

After all, for those within the SEO realm, the leaked information has not really come as a shock for Search Engine Optimisation, it’s been useful to clarify strategy and we’ve used it to support many of our optimisation activities.

It’s more scary that they have had a data breach in the first place.