Case Study – Farm House Tack

1. The Challenge
2. The Brand
3. The Beginning 
4. Opportunities
5. The Strategy
6. Conclusion 
7. Results 

The Challenge

After over 35 years of serving equestrians as a brick-and-mortar business, Farm House Tack wanted to grow its eCommerce business to a place where it could compete with the larger players in its industry.

They had made many attempts at making a larger push into eCommerce and had seen some consistent growth, but not at the level they were hoping for.

The Brand

Farm House Tack sells everything an equestrian needs. Whether you’re a seasoned pro, the non-horsey parent of a horse-crazed kid, a casual trail rider, or a career competitor – you’re most likely to find something that best fits your budget and requirements without compromising quality.

They are best known for their experienced, passionate, and knowledgeable staff that do a great job in helping you choose the right product by offering expert advice on the latest trends.

Their slogan is “We ride. We show. We know.”, their internal knowledge is incredible and presented a lot that could be brought to the world via email and content.

Founded by Patricia Lehner in 1979, Farm House Tack is still growing 40 years later across the country with multiple physical stores and now even has an online presence. 

The Beginning 

We started working with Farm House Tack at the end of Q3 2019. At this point, they were generating a revenue of $49,000 from their returning customers and $174,000 in total for the quarter, meaning $58,000 a month, which is levels of magnitude different than where they are now.

So, they were in a place where they wanted to grow but didn’t know how to do that, which is why we teamed up.

Opportunities

One of the opportunities that we saw here was that they had a powerful presence on social media and were beginning to invest in SEO. Their social presence is one of the reasons they were punching above their weight class was having such a strong personality and domain expertise. 

However, the strong engagement they saw on social was not translating to the work they were doing in email.

They were sending daily promotional campaigns with little to no segmentation or strategy built into their system.

The Strategy

We knew there was an audience for their insights and expertise, so we wanted to start by getting them onboard with communicating via email.

The first thing we did when working with them was to establish lifecycle automations to ensure we had a robust foundation to build off of. And we were pretty quick to implement those since we started in Q3 and the holidays were quite up close. 

We also planned for the expansion after that time by getting holiday planning and promotions in line so that later we could again come out swinging and understand beforehand how content needs to be connected with the context to maximize those opportunities. 

Also, we migrated over to Klaviyo from Constant Contact, which helped us heaps in building automations after it was integrated with their BigCommerce store.

Out of the gate, we knew they were leaving money on the table, so we worked to address that quickly.

Their revenue from email was less than tens of thousands of dollars a month which makes it evident that they lacked strategy around retention, content, or frequency of sending that content. 

For instance, they were sending out daily emails with zero segmentation. And without understanding how and why a piece of content would benefit a member of their audience.

So, we came in and started helping them act more strategically. We created segments according to different products and use cases, along with collecting data in our popover forms. For example, based on hunter jumper, dressage, eventer, and child rides. By doing that, we understood what they were going to need along the way. 

And then, once we had introduced our automations, we started to build a campaign cadence of sending two content and one sales-focused email every week, plus another one on Sundays that was all about apparel recommendations, put together in a really friendly manner.

Basically, we wanted to make the individuals in the business known entities, so we could show off their expertise and individual prowess in those categories. In that regard, what we did here was to bring their excellent customer service into a digital space through content and email marketing.  

And soon, we started seeing the results as they entered Q4 and broke all their previous records in terms of revenue. For instance, November (2019 Q4) was their biggest month for returning customers. They also tripled their largest daily revenue threshold that month, with a $27,000+ day! 

The week before Black Friday/Cyber Monday, it all went beyond their capacity, but we continued consistently with our strategies, and it ended as the strongest year they ever had.

And then, we transitioned that from Q4 into Q1 of 2020, building that consistency in cadence, introducing two new automations every month, understanding each customer’s lifecycle, and then optimizing accordingly over time. Consequently, we were able to segment and strategize around who was going to receive what at what time and how to keep that rhythm going.

Since then, in addition to introducing one email automation a month, we’ve incorporated SMS into their automations and campaigns. We’ve also built VIP lists and specific segments around the different data we want to collect. 

Most importantly, we’ve been consistent with our efforts throughout. Although we sometimes bumped it a little bit up, for example, around the sales peaks, we don’t want to do that often and go too hard with it.

We’ve also helped build additional sales peaks into their year to drive volume at different times, like the summer and the fall, and also collect a lot of helpful data (like their horse’s name and birthday) and use it in a forward-facing manner. 

And using that data, we’ve not only been able to explore all our sales opportunities but also add value by connecting content with the context of a rider’s life at different times of the year with our campaigns. For example, in the fall, we share articles like ‘how to dress for the winter, how to stay warm, or how to keep your horse warm in the fall.’ 

All such things helped build strong relationships, which eventually enabled us to drive more repeat purchasers over time – the reason why we went all the way from $49,000 in revenue from repeat customers to $1,380,000 until Q2 of 2022! And that’s some seriously massive growth in that business. But we didn’t stop here; we continued our efforts to maintain that high level of repeat purchasers and serve them in unique ways.

Also, once they had made enough, we were finally able to evolve and afford some upgrades, like moving them to Shopify Plus, introducing a loyalty program, and incorporating Shopify POS into their physical store to increase revenue from there as well. 

And what was striking about that is we finally had clarity about how much revenue our emails were driving to their in-store locations.

Because if we could see people clicking on our emails from within a 200-mile radius and then going in and converting at an in-store experience, we could figure out where our omnichannel shoppers were suddenly coming from and how we could maximize those opportunities when available and presented.

We finally had more clarity on how well our online marketing drives in-store behavior at their retail locations. And since then, they’ve opened up new retail locations around the country and have had a lot of unique opportunities to drive more revenue quarter after quarter, month after month, year after year.

Conclusion 

We love how they started off as a brick-and-mortar store with just a little bit of an e-commerce presence, and now they’ve ACTUALLY become a huge e-commerce business with a strong physical presence and are having the best of both worlds. 

They get to have such strong bonds with their customers because of the value they keep adding, which makes people return to them on a consistent basis. In fact, we’ve even come across customers that specifically ask for people who create content for them, and they are like, ‘Hey can I talk to Michelle or Lizzie?’  because they know their faces and names and find the content they share highly valuable.

So, as I always say,

We’re never going to be able to out-scale Amazon, but we can out-human them!

Robbie Fitzwater

That allows us to differentiate ourselves from others in the market even if the space gets more competitive.

And if we look at it in terms of revenue, considering how much difference we were able to make, it would be almost 28 times more than what they were making back then in 2019 from repeat purchasers. 

Also, we’ve been able to open the door for a lot more things for this business. Still, we’re continuing to innovate, optimize and evolve because we know that there’s more and more opportunity there, and we have some cool plans coming forward.

This is just one example of how we’re able to drive revenue for them consistently and grow this business through retention efforts because we know that lifetime value is going to be way more than we can even imagine!

Results 

Farm House Tack was an established brick-and-mortar store with a not-so-impressive e-commerce presence BUT strong social media grounds. We found an excellent opportunity there and started implementing our thoughtful marketing strategies to drive some audience. 

Also, we observed that they were not making the best out of their email side either, so we went for a content approach that would make them feel valued and cared for, thus keep bringing them back in the door.

And here are the outcomes of our retention effort (from Q3 of 2019 to Q4 of 2022):

1. Went from $2000 a day (Q3, 2019) to $20,000 a day (Q4, 2019) in just a couple of months.
2. Monthly revenue from repeat purchasers skyrocketed from $60,000 to $460,000.
3. 13980.46% increase in total revenue from Q3 2019 to Q2 2022.
4. 693% increase in revenue from repeat purchasers from Q3 2019 to Q2 2022.
5. Currently, they’re making 28 X more than what they were making in 2019.