Who is Groove Life?

Peter Goodwin, Founder and CEO of Groove Life, first had the idea to advance the concept of silicone wedding rings while guiding adventure trips in the Alaskan bush. Peter’s active lifestyle made a metal wedding ring dangerous, and rubber rings were uncomfortable. He set out to design a highly durable yet extremely comfortable version of a silicone ring for active people everywhere.

That was in the summer of 2015. By December, he had launched his very own silicone ring— the Groove Ring— on Kickstarter and knocked it out of the park. From Kickstarter, Groove Life went on to rapidly build their business, moving their headquarters from Alaska to Nashville, Tennessee. Since then, the brand has skyrocketed, going from just 6 employees in January 2018 to now nearly 200 employees. Groove has evolved from a small silicone ring shop to an inspirational, outdoor lifestyle brand.

Partnering with Metacake for an Ecommerce Growth Strategy

As Groove was getting started, Peter connected with us here at Metacake. Our specialty is using deep ecommerce business experience coupled with top-notch expertise in website design, paid traffic, and email marketing to drive real, healthy growth for ecommerce-first brands. Our specialized team employs years of ecommerce experience to drive healthy business growth in key areas. These include business growth strategy, email marketing, paid marketing, and website migrations, and optimizations.

Metacake’s passion is for helping grow brands that matter, believing that customer-focused brands with authentic missions help build a better world. Groove’s mission and values were strongly aligned with our own and we saw massive potential for the brand. As a result, we were eager to come alongside Peter to help drive strategic growth for the company by unlocking several areas of opportunity.

The Recipe for Hyper Ecommerce Growth

If you look at Groove’s path to success, you’ll find there has not been any singular home run. Anyone seasoned in direct-to-consumer ecommerce businesses knows success requires a multi-faceted approach.

For Groove, we provided strategic and technical assistance in the following areas:

• Site design and development
• Email marketing
• Paid marketing
• Ongoing strategy, coaching, and consulting

Let’s dive into how each played an important role in scaling Groove Life from brand new to over 8 figures in revenue in just 3 years.

Site Design and Development

We worked with Groove to design and build a site on Shopify that reflected and communicated the purpose of their brand. This design strategy was far deeper than being aesthetically pleasing for the outdoor adventurer. Our primary focus was to create a seamless customer journey from homepage to checkout, with intuitive navigation to route customers where they need to go.

The work was not over once the site launched. From there, we provided guidance on an intentional content strategy to boost SEO as well as ongoing optimization efforts on critical pages to increase the conversion rate.

Paid Marketing

Paid marketing has also played a major role in acquiring new Groove customers. We worked closely with Groove’s team to scale Facebook, Instagram, and Google campaigns to competitive heights.

With paid advertising, we used a funnel approach that guides site visitors from the initial ad all the way through the first sale (and beyond):

Acquiring New Traffic:

Facebook and Instagram campaigns captured cold traffic with engaging video campaigns that helped new visitors understand why a silicone ring is a good idea and, more importantly, what Groove’s brand is all about. As ad inventory on Facebook became crowded and algorithms changed circa 2018, Groove found considerable success acquiring cold traffic using YouTube ads as well. For more on using video ads, check out our post on foolproof video ad funnels.

Retargeting Visitors:

After the initial site visit or product page view, they are retargeted with ads that message features and benefits as well as outstanding customer reviews. If customers add a ring to their cart but abandon checkout, they are taken a step further in the ad funnel and will be retargeted with dynamic product ads that remind them to complete their purchase.

Nurturing Customers:

We also utilized retargeting ads for previous customers whenever Groove ran a sale or launched a new product. However, the most effective tool for maintaining relationships with existing customers and increasing their lifetime value is email marketing, which we’ll walk through next.

Email Marketing

When done well and equipped by an email platform truly built for ecommerce, email marketing can have some of the largest impact for online revenue. And for Groove Life, a strong email program powered by Klaviyo became a home run.

Our secret sauce to sustainable, healthy ecommerce growth is growing a raving customer fan base. This takes more than simply sending emails that push sales and promotions. It requires building valuable relationships with site visitors and customers at scale.

Klaviyo is the perfect email service provider to accomplish this. We’ll provide a quick synopsis of our recipe for email success below, but you can dive into the entire gameplan in-depth right here.

Email Campaigns

We used a combination of promotion-driven and content-driven one-off email campaigns, all of which came from a marketing calendar.

Automated Sequences

Klaviyo’s automated email sequence tool allowed us to build entire automated flows that follow up with customers based on how they interacted with Groove’s site. This is extremely powerful for building customer relationships at scale.

Audience Segmentation

Using Klaviyo also allowed us to segment their quickly growing email list into smaller groups based on interest and behaviors. This meant Groove could talk to certain customer groups and exclude others, ensuring that emails are as relevant and personal as possible.

Ultimately an intentional email marketing strategy unlocked massive opportunity for Groove Life, which now manages over 1 million email contacts through Klaviyo. In Groove’s lifetime, over $8.5M in revenue can be directly attributed to email marketing in Klaviyo, with 58% related to automated flows and 42% from campaigns. This revenue is even greater when you take indirect attribution into account.

Snapshot of Groove’s List Growth:

To close…

One of the most important aspects of Groove’s business growth is its highly engaged audience. This engagement is evident across the board, from comments on Facebook ads to rave reviews on their site.

It’s important to note that this interactive customer base did not appear on their own. It took an intentional, multi-channel strategy that combined a great site experience, engaging paid marketing, and relevant email communication to build raving fans.

The result? A brand new business grew from 0 to over 8 figures in just three years.

 

Take a look at Founder and CEO Peter Goodwin’s take on this crazy growth in his testimonial video below!

 

“Metacake has become an integral part of our business over the past 3 years. We have tasked them with everything from design and development to driving our growth marketing. They are first class, professional and honest. They are the best agency we have worked with. I highly recommend them!

– Peter Goodwin, CEO, Groove Rings