Global Agency Awards 2022 Nominations for Blend Commerce

Blend Commerce focuses on being the best eCommerce Customer Experience (CX) Agency for Shopify businesses. Our work includes Klaviyo email marketing, UI/UX Design, Shopify Theme Development, and all the gritty stuff in-between. We obsessively focus on improving Shopify businesses CX pre, during, and post-purchase to increase the most important eCommerce metrics for long term growth. 

We provide the skills and experience anyone would expect from a leading Shopify agency including design, development, and marketing. We use all of these skills in conjunction with each other to create a seamless experience for customers on all eCommerce stores and brands.

The Global Agency Awards

The Global Agency Awards are there to celebrate the impacts that agencies make across the globe. The awarding Judges keep an eye out for agency expertise through SEO, content, social, branding, PR, advertising, and paid media. Agencies are required to understand their clients’ brand and vision while developing a strategy that maximises their influence and dominates the market. 

Our Nominated Work

We have been shortlisted for three Global Agency Awards in 2022. We have also applied to a fourth which doesn’t contain a shortlist. As we put our best foot forward in all that we do, here are the awards along with our nominated work:

• eCommerce Agency of the Year:

Instead of jumping straight in and implementing a hit-and-hope strategy, our approach is different in that we believe we need to take a step back and understand how their customers interact with their brand and store. We audit and analyse their store’s data and identify not only the weaknesses and quick wins but also key areas of growth potential. We call this step a 360° eCommerce Review of their business. We stand by this process and have seen how it can be the cornerstone of future growth for a Shopify store. After that, we then move into the Implementation Phase where we start to progressively improve elements of the store by introducing key growth-focused apps or custom-built features and functionality. Key milestones are outlined in phase 1 in order to get an understanding of timings and launch dates. 

We stagger all new improvements to understand and track the impact on the store’s growth. We start with foundation elements and elements we believe will have the highest impact first, then progressively move into elements which we can then build on top of that to further consolidate the store’s growth. Another crucial benefit of the approach is that if the predicted data hypotheses are incorrect, it is easy to roll back an iteration to a previous version.

• Innovative Agency of the Year:

We aimed to set out to differentiate our service offering and the marketing of our agency by starting an on-demand technical department, allowing high-growth brands access to our designers, developers, marketing team, and growth consultants. Narrowing our focus to retention where the ever-increasing costs of acquisition are eminent and ensuring to hone our skills even further than before. The compounding improvement of all the key metrics helps us improve the CLV and by using various forms of quantitative and qualitative data, we systematically make improvements to the Customer Lifecycle from the awareness stage through to the post-purchase success phase. We utilise a variety of tools and processes to accomplish this growth, namely:

1. eCommerce Growth Formula
2. Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM) Segmentation and Analysis
3. Net Promoter Score (NPS) Implementation
4. The Jobs To Be Done (JBTD) Methodology
5. Demographic User Testing
6. Qualitative Research with Web Surveys
7. Hotspot & Heatmap Analysis

• Best Small Agency of the Year:

With so much change in the eCommerce space, our agency has successfully adapted and offered a Customer Experience focused agency. There is currently no other UK based Shopify agency focusing on this section, and it’s enabled us to secure relationships with a broad range of US and UK brands. By being guided by our three core values of Teamwork, Communication, and Excellence, we’re able to instil the confidence in agencies that Shopify merchants need.

• CRO Agency of the Year (no shortlist):

We are going beyond CRO and focussing on Customer Value Optimisation (CVO), making sure Customer Lifetime Value and Customer Retention are core focusses in addition to CRO.

Our clients where implementation has taken place and exceeded expectations are:

1. Goat Milk Stuff – https://www.goatmilkstuff.com/

• Bounce rate has reduced from 62.29% to 55.05% (an 11.61% improvement in the first four months.
• Average page views increased by 10.53%
• A conversion rate increase of 6.5% in Nov 2020 to 9.4% in Nov 2021

2. Titan Casket – https://www.titancasket.com.

• 731% increase in sales
• 635% increase in total orders 
• 626% increase in online sessions 

3. Aquarium Co-Op – https://www.aquariumcoop.com/

• 144% year on year Increase in Store Revenue
• 34% Increase in Conversion Rate
• 73% Increase in Store Sessions

4. Damn Filters – https://www.damnfilters.com/

• 191% Increase in Conversion Rate
• 211% Increase in Store Revenue
• 79% Increase in Average Order Value

5. Hunter & Gather – https://www.hunterandgatherfoods.com/

• 29% of Revenue is now from Owned Revenue
• 51% of Owned Revenue originated from Flows
• 0% Unsubscribe Rate
• 1,062 new email subscribers generated per month

Our Team

We are thrilled to be shortlisted for these nominations and are always proud of the work that we provide our clients. Our team is exceptional at what they do and they keep surprising us on new levels of ingenuity. Our awards in the past have shown their excellence and we’re certain they will shine once again this year. Our case studies prove that our clients reach new heights they didn’t think possible and reap the rewards of hard work and clear communication. We also aim to always keep our clients and those who are interested up to date with the latest inspirations, developments, and inventions of the industry by consistently updating our blog. 

As a growing company, these are our objectives for the future:

• Increase agency annual revenue
• Retain 80% of core clients and increase revenue from recurring retainers from 60% yo 70%
• Increase retained client count from 12-18
• Complete 3 website redesign projects per quarter
• Recreate additional team members and increase team size from 16-25 employees
• Promote 3 team members into senior leadership roles