Hi there,
Welcome to the 5th edition of "State of anew sleep".
Every month I share snippets of what I (and the team) at anew sleep are working on.
Here's what happened.
Seasonality in Our Sales
It’s almost impossible to find an industry not affected by seasonality, and ours is no different.
Selling weighted blankets is undoubtedly easier when it’s colder, which has the opposite effect when it’s hot. 🥵
This is why, as soon as temperatures hit above 20 degrees, we saw an immediate drop in our revenue and conversion rates.
Even my dog, Cooper, prefers to stay in the shade when it’s 24 degrees.
If Cooper finds it too hot right now, surely our customers might think a weighted blanket is a little too warm. ☀️
But we anticipated this. We felt the same impact on our sales last year.
This means we’ll have to prioritize our ad spend on other products and focus on optimizing that.
But we’ll be back in August or September, ready to sell more weighted blankets.
Optimizing Sales
With our sales taking a hit, we took the time and effort to optimize our website and products to better serve the needs of our customers in the coming months.
In just a few days, we:
- Optimized product pages, boosting some product conversion rates by over 45%.
- Added new, relevant creatives to both Meta and our website for this season.
- Made radical changes to how and where our ad spend is used.
- Optimized key elements in our email marketing.
All of the above has positively impacted our sales, and we’re now very confident about boosting sales during our “off season.”
Planning Our Next SEO Sprint
In the past few months, we’ve neglected our efforts to build topical authority and optimize for more organic traffic through Google.
There’s really no excuse other than a lack of time.
It requires someone dedicated to writing, optimizing, and improving content.
With every Google update, the SERPs change, as does Google’s interpretation of search intent. This means you can be #1 and dominate a keyword in one update, and then find yourself buried on pages 2-10 with zero traffic in the next.
Right now, I am planning a comprehensive list for our upcoming SEO sprint.
We will be working on:
- Optimizing 50 articles on our website and refreshing the content.
I expect this to give us an immediate boost. Often with the right initiatives, keywords can move from positions 5-15 to the top 3 with less than 10 minutes spent on optimizing. - Creating over 30 articles focused on new product releases coming EoY.
To better position ourselves and attract relevant customers for our upcoming products, we will focus on creating content that our customers will be searching for early in their buying process—perhaps even before they are aware of their needs. - Building authority and tier 2 backlinks to further boost our site.
This will be done through guest posts, link insertions, and paid backlinks. For the paid backlinks, I am using a combination of my own network and platforms.
Whilst I am a huge advocate for using AI to optimize SEO and create content, there are still important tasks that need a human touch. For this, we might need an SEO lead in the new sleep at some point.
To achieve these goals, I will be using:
- SurferSEO to analyze and plan content. This is by far the best tool to optimize content for SEO with—if you’re not a seasoned SEO pro, this is a gamechanger.
- Agility Writer to create content at scale through AI. I’ve personally created over 100 articles using AW to date—it’s the best tool out there.
- AI Links to create tier 2 backlinks to further boost the power of our backlinks. I’ve tried a ton of services and find their links to be the best.
If you want to save some money (and improve your P&L), here are some discount codes for them. I even reached out to AI Links to get one. 😄
SurferSEO: No discount codes. Sorry. ❤️🩹
Agility Writer: WAS15 (get 15% off)
AI Links: Kristian30 (get 30% off)
Optimizing Our P&L
Running an e-commerce business has become increasingly challenging in the past few years.
Now, you need to be better than good at your numbers and understand what makes your business run smoothly.
To stay ahead, we’re constantly optimizing our business processes, reevaluating our partnerships, and striving to improve cost efficiency at every possible point.
You’d be amazed at how much a 5, 10, or 15% drop in price or a 5, 10, or 15% increase in efficiency can impact your unit economics. By focusing on these areas, we can ensure our business remains not only viable but also profitable.
To achieve this, we:
- Regularly review our suppliers and logistics to ensure we’re getting the best prices and the most reliable service.
- Implement automation tools to streamline operations, reduce errors, and increase efficiency.
- Constantly negotiate with our partners for better pricing, terms, and conditions to reduce costs.
- Ensure we have the right products in stock without overcommitting capital to inventory that doesn’t move quickly.
- Keep a close eye on key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify areas where we can improve and take action.
By focusing on this, we can make significant improvements to our profitability and ensure we continue to grow sustainably long term.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading so far. I will be doing this every month. If there's something specific you want to hear about in these updates: Shoot me a message on LinkedIn.
See you in a month.
