Our client is running an eCommerce store selling incredible extensions for WooCommerce, with three immensely successful, powerful and flexible extensions being Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce, Order Delivery Date Pro for WooCommerce and Abandoned Cart Pro.
Tyche Softwares Plugins
Tyche Softwares provides a variety of premium plugins for WooCommerce. Some of these allow you to recover lost sales, while some turn your store into a booking platform.
Tyche Softwares’ CEO had contacted us in August 2015 through our Website Inquiry form explaining his business case and goals over the next year, where does the business stand and what are the main apparent challenges they were facing to date. Our CEO Mario scheduled a call with him and went over the project requirements, exploring the business model further and identifying key bottlenecks to be worked on accordingly.
After establishing the rough plan for the next months, Tyche Software and DevriX have signed a WordPress retainer plan which focuses on the marketing and PR efforts for the company, incorporating various inbound and outbound activities promoting the suite of WooCommerce extensions, as well as implementing a wide set of side features on a server level, the development side and on the creative end, which facilitate the marketing efforts and represent the company appropriately among the wide international audience of WooCommerce plugin users. 10 months in we work closely together and reach milestone after milestone.
Our Business Process
As with the majority of the growing businesses out there, growing the revenue over time, improving the brand awareness and reaching better exposure are among the top priorities as a whole. While reviewing the existing site and marketing activities, we have identified a number of specific things that require attention and continuous work in order to reach our mutual goals.
Technical Obstacles
- The previous website was using a heavy premium theme that was slow and clumsy
- The marketing website and support forums were bundled in the same install
- The server infrastructure was slow and unreliable, and required additional work
- The platform itself required performance updates and stability enhancements
Marketing Obstacles
- The overall look and feel wasn’t impressive and could have used a drastic facelift
- Product pages had generic look and feel instead of specialized templates focusing on their advantages and features
- There were other landing pages missing here and there
- Outbound exposure was limited
- Social media presence was subpar
- Among other things
Technical Implementation
Technical Updates and Server Migration
Since growing the traffic, increasing the conversion rates and ranking better in SERP are heavily dependent on ranking criteria such as: site load speed, bounce rate (heavily dependent on speed, UI and content) and overall usability, our first goal was speeding up the site and making it more usable for the general public.
Our technical lead did prepare a technical review of the platform with a 5-page plan including MySQL query optimizations, reducing HTTP requests, splitting down the site in two parts (marketing site and support site), and moving to a custom non-restrictive VPS running an nginx + php-fpm stack with memcached on MariaDB instead of a generic Apache and mod-php one.
This has been implemented in several quick iterations which ended up on hosting the new couple of sites on Digital Ocean – a very powerful yet cost-effective solution running the existing eCommerce store at the moment. Moving SSL certificates and settling the MX records from Google Apps has been a part of the migration process as well.
This has resulted in a good separation of the marketing and forum systems, drastically improving speed and security and introducing opportunities for expanding the marketing and promotional efforts on the marketing end.
Switching to Genesis Framework
Our business department did brainstorm on the best compromise of migrating away from the former WordPress theme not adhering to the best web standards and bringing both speed, flexibility and creative freedom for the new marketing website. The best compromise between time + money and benefits was a fork of a Genesis child theme.
Genesis is a well-known and recognized framework in the WordPress community that prides itself with being secure, SEO-optimized and supporting a good level of backwards compatibility. Stepping on top of the Genesis Framework allowed us to make use of a solid base without wasting billable hours on building a completely custom theme from scratch that doesn’t break the layout and structure of close to a couple thousand indexed entries.
Creative and Marketing Improvements
Product and Landing Pages
Once switching to Genesis, we spent a few hours doing a major facelift of the main marketing pages that we needed, a completely custom homepage, and several other elements to be reused across the website. We have also designed new custom headers for each of the main products, as well as a better index grid for the eCommerce store Products page that is easier to use and understand by the general buyer.
Over the course of a few months we went over most of the pages, iteratively based on analytics and internal research, marketing goals and keyword value, which is now an ongoing process refactoring existing pages and building landing page templates for additional things we target together.
Social Media Presence
Our social media person went over the existing social media accounts and applied a few content changes, prepared a social media strategy for the current accounts, and proposed additional networks that we can tackle. We’ve crafted new header, cover and background photos for all accounts and implemented several publishing tools for scheduled publishing, automated discovery of new users by interests and data analysis tools for better understanding of our target audience.
We prepare a social media plan based on various events, product launches or updates, changelogs and other activities happening in Tyche Softwares’ storehouse and the WordPress ecosystem as a whole.
Screencast Recording
Among the social media presence, Tyche Softwares now has a new YouTube account as well. In addition to our technical, creative and marketing plans, we got a WordPress screencaster on board who has recorded several training videos for the main WooCommerce plugins sold by the company. While the screencasting plan is running in a parallel track mostly as a side activity, it’s a crucial part of both the marketing exposure, building transparency regarding the plugin features and their usability, and improving the documentation (hence decreasing support) which positively influences the sales numbers and frees up support time that could be better spend on QA or development.
Taison Joins the Family!
As a part of the branding activities, our creative team had worked on numerous iterations of mascot planning, sketching, drawing and finalizing. As a result we’re happy to announce the new mascot of Tyche Softwares‘ called Taison:
We have announced Taison online and also placed him in different areas of the site, as well as a part of other promotional materials, newsletters and the like.
Networking and Brand Building
Tyche Softwares’ CEO has attended WordCamp Sofia in October 2015 and DevriX is representing Tyche Softwares’ WooCommerce shop at WordCamp Belgrade 2016 as well. We have been forming and nurturing partnerships with media outlets, bloggers, affiliates, happy customers which leads to referrals, positive testimonials, ideas for writing new case studies, preparing new tutorials and increasing the overall amount of traffic and content in the company blog.
Business Results
Whilst Tyche Softwares’ partnership with DevriX is ongoing and growing, we are continuously growing the audience on social media, the traffic to tychesoftwares.com and the conversion rates on the site. Given the faster and more usable site, as well as a better structure of documentation and the new video tutorials, customer’s level of trust is higher and that impacts the brand exposure and sales numbers altogether.
N.B. It’s worth noting that DevriX is not directly involved with the product development department at Tyche Softwares. Tyche Softwares’ developers are entirely responsible for their product development, and DevriX supports their technical culture, know-how and code quality entirely. One of the initial steps before signing a contract was reviewing the plugin code base as we can only support the marketing efforts of a company worth being promoted, selling outstanding products that speak for themselves and simply need more exposure in order to satisfy more customers across the world.
Having said that, DevriX will continue maintaining the brand awareness, marketing and PR efforts as a part of our ongoing retainer plan with all of our technical, creative and marketing know-how and steadily grow the traffic and sales for Tyche Softwares’ WooCommerce portfolio.