02 — THE NUMBERS AT A GLANCE
8:1
ROAS up from 5:1
65%
Of e-commerce revenue from CRM
47%
Avergae email open rate up from 26%
03 — the SITUATION
Comms Express is a £29m technology e-commerce business selling networking, power and infrastructure hardware across fifteen vendor brands including Cisco, HPE Aruba, APC, Vertiv, Draytek and Zyxel.
Everything was profitable. Paid search and shopping returned 5:1 on around £180,000 a month. Email contributed 40% of e-commerce revenue. By any reasonable measure it was working, and that view was firmly held.
Which is exactly why nothing had changed in years.
There was no marketing strategy. There was a set of activities that had been inherited, repeated and gradually optimised into a local maximum. Nobody had asked what the marketing function was actually for, who the business was competing against, or why a buyer should choose Comms Express over another reseller listing identical stock at a similar price.
Underneath it, the operation was being run by two marketing executives fresh out of university. Talented, but nobody had ever taught them the difference between selling and marketing, and there was no senior person setting a standard or protecting their time.
The symptoms were everywhere once you looked. Fifteen brands marketed identically, to one list, in one tone, regardless of the fact that an IT director specifying Cisco infrastructure has nothing in common with a small business buying a Draytek router. Product descriptions thin enough to hurt search visibility and conversion simultaneously. Landing pages that weren't built to convert. Every email a price and a product.
Businesses in this position are the hardest to help, because there's no crisis to point at. The strategic work isn't fixing something broken. It's proving that comfortable isn't the same as optimal.
04 — THE FUN BIT
what
We dId
01
audited current performance
We audited every active channel and campaign to understand what was running, what it cost and what it genuinely returned. That meant looking beyond headline revenue and questioning how much of the performance was incremental—and how much the business would likely have generated without the advertising.
The review showed that a significant portion of paid spend was capturing existing demand rather than creating new growth.
03
built a proposition that worked
Fifteen vendor brands, several of them direct competitors to each other, all under one retailer. That's a positioning problem before it's a marketing problem. The answer was to stop positioning the brands and start positioning the buying experience: expertise, availability, and knowing which product actually fits the job.
02
redefined what marketing did
The team were running sales activity and calling it marketing. Nothing built demand, nothing educated, nothing gave anyone a reason to buy from Comms Express rather than the next reseller with the same stock.
We reset the remit. Marketing's job was to create the conditions for the sale, not to be the sale. That single change is upstream of every number on this page.
04
set the channel strategy
Where to spend, where to stop, and what to test. Google and Bing, search and shopping, restructured around buyer type rather than product feed. Email repositioned from a sales channel to a retention and expertise channel.
05
fixed the fundamentals
Product descriptions, category pages and the on-site journey, alongside the wider team. Thin product data on a technical catalogue costs you twice, once in search visibility and again in conversion.
Email rebuilt on segmentation by brand affinity, purchase behaviour and buying role. Creative rebuilt, frequency made consistent, deliverability addressed properly.
04 — the outcome
What Worked
What Was the Hardest
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Return on ad spend went from 5:1 to 8:1 blended across paid search and shopping, on roughly £180,000 of monthly media. On that spend, the difference is worth around £540,000 in additional monthly revenue from the same budget.
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CRM's contribution to e-commerce revenue rose from 40% to 65% within eight months. Open rates reached 47.78%, up 10.78 points. Revenue per recipient settled at £0.28, above industry benchmark.
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Bounce rate fell 78% and user engagement rose 317% following the site work.
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Not the marketing. The internal politics.
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A business performing well has no obvious reason to change, and every suggestion sounds like criticism of whoever built the current version. Getting from "it's working" to "it could be considerably more" took longer than any of the technical work, and required proving it in small pieces before anyone would back the bigger changes.
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Worth knowing if you're in the same position. The case gets made with numbers, in stages, not with a strategy deck.
