How Bhu Foods Increased their Online Sales by 25%: Step by Step Guide

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If you’re an e-commerce business owner, you know how tough it can be to establish a strong presence in an industry that’s home to a countless number of companies.

One of the best things you can do for your e-commerce business is to create a strong sales funnel by employing digital marketing to generate leads and get more customers.

In this step-by-step walkthrough, we’ll take a look at growing your business online with a variety of digital marketing techniques by analyzing Bhu Foods’ success with Wishpond.

The goal


First, let’s take a look at what Bhu Foods was looking to achieve with their Wishpond campaign.

Bhu Foods was already quite successful in the retail market, as their products held a prime position in over 730 health food stores along the West Coast. Unfortunately, the e-commerce portion of their business wasn’t finding quite the same success.

To break through strongly into the online market, Bhu Foods worked with Wishpond’s fully-managed team to craft a creative and effective digital marketing campaign. More specifically, their goal was to increase social media engagement, boost website traffic and – of course – drive sales for their business through their e-commerce operations.

Depending on your marketing experience, you might not need to depend on a fully-managed team like Wishpond’s for your digital marketing needs. You can use a suite of digital marketing tools (but hey, Wishpond has those too) to craft a digital marketing campaign on your own.

Creating a Contest


To generate traction for their business online, Bhu Foods worked with Wishpond to develop a marketing strategy with the goal of generating leads (otherwise known as contacts or prospects).

Though you may think of leads as traditionally relating to sales, any type of business can use leads to drive business online.

After speaking with Bhu Foods about their products and past marketing successes, the Wishpond team decided to create and run a social media contest to build buzz and generate leads for Bhu. Bhu decided to give away a 6 month supply of their healthy (and tasty!) bars for their contest prize, which made the giveaway enticing to their target market.

Using a landing page builder, the Wishpond fully-managed team created an eye-catching contest landing page optimized for conversion.

If you’re creating a landing page for your own marketing campaign, here’s a few takeaways from Bhu’s page that you can use to maximize social engagement and the number of leads you generate:

  • Countdown timer: Adding a countdown timer to the top of your campaign page helps to create urgency. Making page visitors aware of the campaign’s limited timeframe helps to get them to act and convert on your campaign immediately.
  • A clear, benefit-oriented headline: The headline on the page (“Win a 6 Month Supply of Bhu Bars”) makes it clear what the contest is about. Showcasing the benefit of the contest in a clear way makes it simple for viewers to understand what it’s about without having to read the rest of the copy on the page.
  • A monetary value: Showing the value of the prize on the page (“A value of $180”) makes the prize a little more “concrete” to page visitors. Making the prize’s value clear helps viewers more quickly decide whether or not it’s worth giving up their personal information to enter the contest.
  • It just looks nice: The page is beautiful – it’s clearly themed with a carefully thought-out color palette. Bhu foods had Wishpond’s design team create a an awesome contest page that clearly communicated the value of the giveaway with a design that was on-brand. Having a great-looking contest page helps your business maintain a professional image and increases the chance of conversion.

Adding Popups


The Wishpond team added a social sharing incentive popup to the contest page to help drive social engagement after entrants converted on the contest page. This popup asked entrants to engage with Bhu Foods (by Liking them on Facebook or Instagram, or sharing their contest) in exchange for extra contest entries.

Adding a social incentive popup helped organically spread the word about Bhu’s contest and brand to the friends and families of contest entrants.

To drive interested traffic to the contest, Bhu Foods used Wishpond’s popup tool to add an entry overlay to their homepage. Because their homepage received the most traffic out of all the pages on their website, Bhu Foods knew it would have the greatest chance of driving as much traffic to their promotion as possible.

Again, Wishpond’s design team created a popup in line with Bhu’s branding and the contest page itself. The popup was simple to understand and highlighted the prize (as well as its value), enticing viewers into clicking the CTA to go to the contest page.

If you find you have a large amount of relevant traffic going to your website, It’s almost always worth to add some sort of tool like a popup to help funnel that traffic towards your promotions page.

Though website visitors are valuable, there’s an enormous chance they’ll bounce, leaving you without a sale. Getting them to convert on a promotion you’re running allows you to get an email at the very least, meaning you can market to them again in the future.

We hadn’t previously worked with any 3rd party marketing companies, and Wishpond was a great surprise. We’ve really appreciated hearing new strategies from capable professionals every time we talk.

And the results are always getting better. We’re excited to see growth month-on-month, and can attribute 25% of our purchases from last month to campaigns with Wishpond. Great company, great professionalism and great results.

– Marketing Director at Bhu

Facebook and Instagram Ads


Creating an awesome-looking contest with a great offer can be cool and all, but it means nothing if nobody’s seeing your page. Though Bhu Foods had a decent following on social media already, their goal was to reach new, untapped segments of their target market – people who weren’t already Bhu fans or customers – so they could expand their reach.

To achieve this goal, the Wishpond team created a set of social media advertising campaigns for Bhu Foods to promote their contest on Facebook and Instagram. This was their primary promotion method, and with good reason.

Facebook and Instagram Ads have incredibly powerful targeting tools (they use the same platform) which allowed Wishpond and Bhu Foods to serve ads to health-conscious people who would be interested in Bhu’s products.

Bhu Foods allotted an ad budget of $3,000 for this campaign. The ad campaigns Wishpond created for Bhu drove a cost-per-click of 78 cents and a cost-per-entrant of about $1.20 – not bad!

Even more impressively, this ads strategy helped pull over 7,000 people to the campaign page, resulting in an impressive 2,737 entrants for Bhu Foods’ contest – all new leads that Bhu Foods can continue to market to drive sales in the future.

Running ads is an awesome way to ensure contest success. Organic reach can be a fickle thing – investing in ads to promote your marketing campaigns is undoubtedly the best way to reach new people within your target market.

Email Marketing


To nurture their 2,737 new leads, Bhu Foods worked with the Wishpond team to develop an email marketing campaign that would turn their new, engaged contacts into sales. They utilized Wishpond’s email marketing tool to quickly build a great-looking email, which they sent to their contest’s entrants.

Like the contest and popups, the email Wishpond designed for Bhu Foods was on-brand and clearly communicated the special offer: 15% off the recipient’s next purchase. The email utilized a few best practices, including the use of merge tags, the presentation of a special offer (a coupon), and a clean, clear CTA button.

Email marketing is an incredibly important of the funnel because it’s fundamentally where you turn leads into sales. Creating an effective newsletter (or email drip campaign) to send to your leads while they’re still interested in your brand and product will help your business find success like Bhu’s.

The Results


Bhu Foods’ Wishpond campaign was a massive success. They generated 2,530 new leads and grew their social media following significantly with 800 new fans on Facebook and Instagram. 44 of their 178 online purchases could be credited to the campaign they ran: a 25% increase in their month-on-month sales.

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