“I would highly recommend Sophie and Beyond Retail, for other companies. We needed assistance quite urgently, and even though Sophie is situated in Stockholm and our company and team in Oslo – she always felt like part of the team.”

— Johanna Jeppsson, Digital Sales & Marketing Director at Orkla Health.

Assignment: 

The goal was to take on the role interim and not only manage the business’ day-to-day online operations and digital presence, but also, focus on three key areas that are important for the client; upskilling the e-commerce team in CRO and performance marketing, implement data-driven ways of working and recommend future investments to increase long-term revenue. 

Our approach: 

First and foremost, Sophie’s focus was to quickly come up to speed in the role as E-Commerce Manager in order to run the day-to-day e-commerce operations. This involved setting up new processes for commercial planning and analysis, onboarding team members in a new analysis format and making sure sales targets were being met. 

Parallel, Sophie’s colleague Kenny Renes from Beyond Retail conducted a CRO audit of the client’s webshops to identify areas of improvement. A similar audit was performed within CRM by Beyond Retail’s CRM specialists and presented in a workshop together with the client. The findings from these audits were then translated into actionable recommendations and prioritized based on potential impact and level of effort to implement the change. 

With the combined insights gathered from the audits as well as data analysis of client’s historical development of E-Commerce KPIs, Sophie could identify possible future focus areas as well as investments to suggest to the client. For example, she suggested a new Saas plugin to meet the client’s need for a more personalized experience on site and in newsletter communication. 

“As Sophie knows, I am very happy with her collected cool, e-commerce knowledge and ability to transfer her knowledge to the team (and others). She has always been very dedicated to her job, and had a structured and data driven approach to solve her tasks. Furthermore, she has a broad knowledge of e-commerce and digital marketing. The topics she has been less comfortable in, she has found a way to learn more on the topic. I will greatly miss her professional skill set, but above all her as a person.”

— Johanna Jeppsson, Digital Sales & Marketing Director at Orkla Health. 

Since another objective was to upskill the team within performance marketing, Sophie took help from her colleagues at Beyond Retail specializing in digital marketing to audit the current processes and educate the client’s organization on what KPIs to follow up performance through. This led to an increased focus within the organization, and as a result, Kenny was assigned to manage performance marketing for the client on an interim basis. He created a new process for ways of working with the client’s media agency as well as several dashboards for the e-commerce team to track performance. 

The projects resulted in five main outputs: 

1. Increased profitability: By implementing changes to the commercial plan, taking into account the changes in production price, as well as shifting focus from heavy discounts to full-price sales, Sophie could create a substantial increase of the client’s contribution margins.
2. Analysis to serve as a basis for future investments: Through analyzing the performance of the different brands’ year-on-year performance, and taking into account the marketing channel mix, Sophie presented valuable insight to both the management and e-commerce team. Together with the CRO and CRM audit, the insights laid the foundation for recommending future investments. 
3. E-Commerce team with new data-driven ways of working: To improve the e-commerce team’s process, new tools, templates and meetings were implemented. For example, Sophie introduced a new analysis format to help the team include insights, actions and results in their analysis.
4. New process to follow up on performance marketing: New dashboards and ways of working with the client’s media agency were introduced in order to increase performance.
5. First actions taken based on recommended future investments: A new UX design for the client’s checkout was created based on the CRO audit. Further, several actions are scheduled for the upcoming months based on audits and analysis. 

Lastly, a handover is currently being facilitated to ensure a seamless handover to the new permanent e-commerce manager, ensuring the continued success of the e-commerce performance.

“I would highly recommend Sophie and Beyond Retail, for other companies. We needed assistance quite urgently and even though Sophie is situated in Stockholm and our company and team in Oslo – she always felt like part of the team.”

— Johanna Jeppsson, Digital Sales & Marketing Director at Orkla Health

This interim assignment has been a perfect example of how we work as consultants at Beyond Retail. Our strength is that we have a mix of e-commerce generalists and CRM and digital marketing specialists, and we take advice from each other in order to fit each client’s individual needs. 

Do you want to know more about how we could customise an interim solution for you? Reach out to Sophie Hermelin through sophie@beyondretail.se or +46 70-348 80 02.