S2 Digital

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the co-owner of Respected Roots. A brand with an e-commerce store and physical locations selling grooming cosmetics and products, such as beard conditioners, body butter, hand sanitizers, bath products, and soaps.

What challenge were you trying to address with S2 Digital?

We hired S2 Digital to help us with email marketing. We'd been online since 2015, so a lot of our digital presence had already been implemented by us, but we needed a more professional approach to our efforts.

What was the scope of their involvement?

Initially, we went through an onboarding phase where I explained our expectations and what we wanted to achieve: grow our email marketing lists to ultimately grow our business online. Then, S2 Digital helped us execute different strategies to attract more people to our online store through creative email marketing.

Throughout this process, they’ve guided us on how to reach more people and be more effective with our email marketing spend, changing our strategy. We’ve used Klaviyo for email marketing and Triple Whale as a tool that has allowed us to see who we should market to.

Additionally, S2 Digital has collaboratively worked with our partners involved in social media and SEO marketing to make sure that strategies for both sides were matching and on point. Through this collaborative effort, we’ve ensured that some of the words and phrases in our email marketing match our SEO strategy.

Our strategy is focused on putting products on sale and letting customers know about them through email campaigns. This way, clients can come to our website and shop online. However, given that we have physical stores too, clients can also redeem digital coupons we send via email directly in our physical stores.

What is the team composition?

I work exclusively with Kevin (Founder & CEO), but I know that he has more people from their team working on our project.

How did you come to work with S2 Digital?

I’m not sure how we found S2 Digital, but I believe we were referred to them by a business acquaintance. Still, we had an interview process with several different companies and ultimately chose them. Something that made S2 Digital stand out from the rest was that they provided a very clear, cohesive, and understandable strategy. Additionally, they were available, responded quickly to our emails, and demonstrated a great ability to articulate what we wanted to do.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent between $12,000–$14,000 on the entire project.

What is the status of the engagement?

We began our partnership in February 2022, and we’re still working with them.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

S2 Digital’s email marketing implementation has been successful; we’ve been able to generate more sales through our website, and we’ve also seen more sales in our physical stores.

How did S2 Digital perform from a project management standpoint?

S2 Digital has performed very well. We always meet the deadlines, and they’re very quick to respond with a lot of emails for us to review. Whenever we need changes, they’re very quick to make them in a timely manner so that we can launch our email campaigns promptly. We communicate mainly via emails and use Basecamp to manage and track the project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

S2 Digital’s ability to adapt their response time to our needs is excellent. They’re great at adjusting on the fly, demonstrating great agility to adhere to the latest industry trends and practices, which is very important for us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

I can't think of anything they should improve on. We’re very satisfied with their work, and they’re very different from other email marketing companies that we’ve worked with.

Any advice for potential customers?

Having clear expectations and open lines of communication would be great for both parties.

Please describe your company and your position there.

MD of a UK based B2B Ecommerce Company.

For what projects/services did your company hire S2 Digital?

S2 essentially became our fractional sales director - We hired S2 Digital to review our sales and marketing efforts - with a view towards designing and implementing from scratch a new phone selling department within the business...

How did you select this vendor?

We interviewed various agencies and fractional sales directors - before choosing S2 based on their obvious strengths across the whole sales and marketing stack. We were impressed by the breadth of their ability across copywriting, marketing strategy, and email and phone selling. The wisdom to guide on how to weave these together to achieve our aims. We liked their pragmatic, lean, results-driven approach and flexibility not just to offer us an off-the-shelf solution - but to really work with us to understand our needs - and develop a bespoke solution to drive results for our business.

Describe the scope of their work in detail.

S2 impressed us with an initial project to review our marketing efforts to date, and competitor review. S2 went above and beyond really nailing our brand, landscape and understanding our entire approach so far. Coming out of this initial review, S2 gave 4 project suggestionsfor improvement and fleshed out the time to implement/potential return of each - and helped us explore the order with which to approach these. To begin with we implemented a fast lean experiment to improve sales conversion. Following this we focussed on our larger aim to rebuild our sales department processes to implement phone selling.

What was the team composition?

I worked closely with Kevin who managed the project for S2.

Can you share any outcomes from the project that demonstrate progress or success?

S2 really shone a light on sales for us! We went from having zero knowledge of phone sales and how to introduce it, to having an entirely new sales process documented, the tech installation within our CRM to conduct and report on phone sales, training materials for our new hire - and importantly the confidence managing the new hire/process. Alongside this we have also received many fantastic email marketing sequences and a plan for where/when to use them to support our new sales process.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

Effective - S2 were available in our slack and were able to jump on calls either on the day or within 24 hours! We used Google Drive for sharing comments on work - and S2 were super open to feedback, iterations and encouraged us feel comfortable in showing them our brand voice and asking for rewrites to fit it.

What did you find most impressive about this company?

S2 is home to fierce intellect that really knows their craft: Online Sales & Marketing! Throughout we knew we had the right people on the job. They had access to each skill needed to implement well: Copywriting, Video, CRM, Email, Phone, Paid Media. Their bredth as well as their depth in each area is awe-inspiring. S2 became a trusted exec level confidante - spending great time to really understand our industry, company stage, and the levers to growth open to us with current resources. They were ideal in helping to coach us in which opportunities to approach in which order as well as giving us a view as to how things could be taken further in the future...

S2 were also great at pushing back and challenging what should be done. They were not just there to simply execute upon clients' wishes, they arrived with an executive level knowledge and ability, and were comfortable challenging and debating what would have the best impact, then would go on to work on the best solution. They were also great at helping to coach and introduce new ideas and approaches that were missing within our team.

They also went above and beyond: Although having used many CRM's - S2 hadn't used our particular CRM before, but took significant time of their own behind the scenes to learn and develop their ability in our CRM provider, meaning they could help us implement the process using our existing tech setup. I was also most impressed by the commitment to results and lean testing. At numerous times the agency could have chosen to upsell or crossell another project (we were very keen to get their help in many areas!) - but they actually encouraged us to take the time to pause, focus and take one step at a time and see and understand one project's results, before rushing into next projects.

They gave guidance as to what would move the needle. Our sales conversion really mattered more to them than adding a new project with us. I can't stress enough the team's personal commitment to over delivery! A team member suffered an unfortunate illness during the project, but afterwards went above and beyond to make up for lost time and to over-deliver far beyond our expectations delivering an additional small project to apologize for the small delay to our project.

Is there any area for improvement or anything that could have been done differently?

We managed most of the project via Google docs - which meant a lot of comments/replies which could be difficult to keep track of on a project of this size. A project management software like Basecamp would be great for the kind of project we worked on. S2 were super flexible and happy to fit within our processes, so i'm sure on future projects they'd be happy to use this with us.

Please describe your company and your position there.

I am the Chief Marketing Officer and responsible for the strategy and execution of all our marketing activities, including email marketing

For what projects/services did your company hire S2 Digital, and what were your goals?

We hired S2 Digital to conduct a review of our email capabilities, and specifically to look into issues with email deliverability. Once that audit had been concluded, S2 Digital then worked on optimising some of our critical email workflows, which was targeted towards a B2B audience. Our goal was to be able to engage a cold audience with our product offering, and to get as many converted into marketing qualified leads as possible.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

We decided to go with S2 on the basis of the reputation of the company, previous projects and after an onboarding call with Kevin Izevbigie, I was comfortable that this was a project that S2 had expertise in.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and marking tools used.

Deliverables:

1. An audit of our current automated email workflows and an assessment of what factors were leading to a low deliverability.
2. A set of recommendations for writing email that would not be marked as spam.
3. Three automated email sequences to help position our best content and product offering in front of a cold audience. S2 helped write the copy for these emails and helped design the sequence of sends.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

We worked directly with Kevin at all times in this project - who was our email deliverability expert and account manager.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Yes, the audit was delivered as requested and we were able to improve our deliverability by approx. 40%. For the automated email sequences, we were able to generate 5 new leads at the time of writing this email, which is a better success rate than what we were getting previously.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

The workflow was sufficient and allowed for easy communication between my team and S2.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

We were impressed with their expertise and knowledge in email marketing. It's clear that they have done this type of project in the past, and Kevin was able to very quickly fine tune our existing emails to be more effective than they were. We're getting a much more positive response from potential leads and that is directly due to the feedback that S2 gave us.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No, as this was a short term 3 month project, there were no opportunities to optimise.