The Black Dog

Engine Ready definitely proved they have the strategy, tools and execution to turn our Ecommerce business into a key contributor of our overall business success

Dan Pucillo – CFO

The Black Dog

The Company

The Black Dog company, located on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, has been a key tourist attraction, popular for their “Black Dog” t-shirts.

Over the past 30 years, The Black Dog has grown from a small island restaurant and gift shop to a $12 million retail, catalog and Ecommerce business.

The Challenge

In the late 1990’s The Black Dog attempted to expand their retail presence by developing an Ecommerce site. Their loyal, New England catalog customers purchased products from the site, but they struggled in attracting new customers to their website. The Black Dog quickly realized that a profitable web presence required analyzing and understanding their current site for visitor trends, as well as an effective and measurable Internet marketing campaign.

The Solution

The Black Dog hired Engine Ready to improve the conversion rate of visitors-to-customers as well as develop online marketing strategies to drive qualified visitors to their site. Using Engine Ready’s web analytics tool, Conversion Analyst, The Black Dog discovered exactly where in their site visitors were exiting before completing the checkout process.

Engine Ready assisted The Black Dog with a significant redesign to their site’s navigation, and launched a search engine marketing campaign in Yahoo Search Marketing and Google AdWords. The search marketing campaign entailed substantial keyword research and utilized robust testing of ad title, ad creative and landing page designs.

The Result

Within 3 months of going live with their new navigation and search marketing campaigns, The Black Dog experienced a 31% increase in online sales and a 50% increase in average order value from $40 to $60.

Along with much greater and profitable web traffic from the search engines, the redesigned navigation led to a 13% visitor-to-customer conversion rate; over double their prior rate.