How Swimart drove 442 reviews in 30 days using Cloutly
Overview
With 76+ retail locations across Australia and New Zealand, Swimart is the country's leading pool and spa specialist (a subsidiary of listed company Waterco - ASX: WAT).
As a retail franchise, Swimart recognised that their customers frequently searched for the kinds of products and services they offer and often make buying decisions based on who shows up first in search results, and how well they're reviewed.
Proving the process: our pilot test
For 30 days from late August through September 2021, we ran a controlled marketing experiment alongside Swimart's team and a small group of keen franchisees, integrating our review generation platform (Cloutly) with their point of sale software.
46% of all Google searches are local, and as a retail-first business, optimising Google My Business was of key importance to Swimart's local SEO strategy. The cornerstone of local SEO: customer reviews. This is where Cloutly came in.
Google gives enormous real estate to local business listings, weighted by three factors: relevance, distance and prominence.
By increasing the volume of reviews you drive for local listings, you improve not only your prominence but your relevance too, as Google crawls review keywords to get a better understanding of the products and services you supply.
Ultimately, we hoped to demonstrate that driving consistent Google reviews using Cloutly (even during a COVID lockdown) could tangibly improve online visibility, searches, calls and maps views (ie: the "near me" search experience) for local businesses.
In just 30 days across our initial 5 pilot locations, Cloutly helped Swimart achieve:
• 90 new reviews
• Average 52% lift in calls
• Average 47% lift in Maps views
• Average 41% lift in Search views
Here's a look at the performance of just one of those locaions:
To verify the importance of reviews to these results, we charted Swimart's Google reviews from 2020 to 2021 for our 5x pilot stores only. Below, you'll see an upswing of 350% in like-for-like September months. The difference? Using Cloutly to automate reviews.
Automating review campaigns
Cloutly's review campaigns helped Swimart engage with their customers and drive reviews easily, effectively and most importantly, reliably. When a customer made a purchase in-store and opted-in to communications, Cloutly's integration enrolled them into a multi-step, ultra-personalised review invite campaign, which would reach out to them over time via email/SMS until they successfully left a review.
Each step of a campaign was fully customised; Swimart could use language that appealed to their customers, whilst also providing a prompt on what they'd like to hear about, specifically.
On average, our pilot trial for only 5x Swimart stores was able to achieve the following mesaging results in 30 days:
• 37.4% open rate
• 12.6% click-thru rate
• 90 reviews
"Cloutly now holds an integral place in our local marketing strategy. The immediate impact reviews have had across our stores, plus the ease with which we can now respond to our customers has been significant."
Nathan Hallahan, National Marketing Manager
Rolling out Cloutly to all 76+ Swimart retail locations
Following the success of our 30-day pilot trial, Swimart began to roll out Cloutly's review system for all 76 stores across Australia and New Zealand.
We then tracked their reviews collected for the next 3 months and tracked the results against the previous year. What we saw was astonishing, and led to tangible growth results.
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