IL Tiramisu
CX Designer,
Marketing Manager,
Web Developer
“IL Tiramisu” stands for “I love Tiramisu”, and the name rightfully rings true as I took on this project during the pandemic. Amongst the hustling of shadow kitchens, deliveries, and social media buzz, IL Tiramisu needed to have a strong online presence in order to compete with the dozens of cookies, cakes, puffs, and bento boxes being advertised in Melbourne’s post-Covid food scene.
Duration
Team
Role
1.5 years (2020-2021)
Team of 2 with customer service representative and patisserie chef.
CX designer, Digital Marketing Manager, Web developer
Key Deliverables
#1 Branding
Designing a branding guide for the Italian dessert store from scratch with nothing but the logo itself meant lots of research for font themes and colour palettes, as well as gathering feedback from the owner and friends alike.
The final branding guide was created to emphasise rich Italian colours (White, Celadon green) with a mood of elegance and luxury (Vegas gold, Black). The colour Coffee is predominantly used as a base text colour. The fonts Petit Formal Script and Vidaloka were chosen to reflect a classic bakery magazine theme. Open Sans, for its easy readability, is used for the body text to balance out other accent fonts.
#2 Product photography
Next, launching an online store meant that the photography of the products had to perfectly depict the experience of the product in the customer's hands before they could see it in real life. It required skill and careful photo shoot planning.
Photo-shoot guideline:
Natural lighting: natural lighting was used to showcase the tiramisus as realistic as possible.
Greenery / flowers: at each season of a new menu launch, fresh flowers were used to compliment the tiramisus.
Decorative touches: elements of the tiramisu flavour were used to highlight the unique tiramisu flavours.
#3 Market testing
We noticed that many online dessert stores also offered delivery, but with no free tiers - and through some of our own internal team testing, we realised this would be one of the biggest pain points for customers in Melbourne during the lockdown.
During the opening month, we advertised a free delivery campaign on Instagram amongst our competitors. We received a total of $2.2k in orders from 57 different orders from 2,104 online store visits. Although offering such a wide delivery radius time-strapped our internal team, this was strong enough evidence to tell us there is a place for IL Tiramisu in the Melbourne food market.
#4 Customer journey map
Through this initial market testing, I studied the process of our conversions through our website and developed a customer journey map. At each step of the journey where consumers' incentives were different, I determined their goals and used it to tailor offers and marketing copy to their needs.
Generally, there were 3 opportunities to improve customer conversion rate:
Pre-acquisition: Posting on social media and engaging regularly to earn customer loyalty.
During acquisition: Recommend tailored “set packages” for each customer segment on the website when they came to shop.
Post-acquisition: Contact customers for feedback to get a 10% discount on their next purchase. Encourage posting and tagging our products on social media.
#5 Social media content marketing
Since most of our customers found us through social media, our marketing strategy centered around converting leads from Instagram, Facebook, and sometimes TikTok. Following these content pillars, we saw a growth of +800 followers on Instagram and +180 followers on Facebook (Aug 2020-Dec 2021).
Content pillars to offer value to customers and grow our online presence:
Advertising new product launches
Information about online orders and logistics
Fun facts about tiramisus and Italian desserts
#6 Shopify store
The first launch of the IL Tiramisu website was in late October 2020. Since then, the website has gone through many iterations informed by Shopify analytics, Google Analytics and social media paid ads data.
The landing page tells a story of how our tiramisus are made and important philosophies that we upkeep through our brand, image, and product. The sequence of the landing page went through a series of adjustments.
For example, there was greater stickiness (the average time a user spends on a web page) when only one product was displayed at a time in the carousel . Packages and product options can cause decision fatigue is customers. Hence, the carousel at the top of the page eliminates this by focusing only on one product at a time. Once users are then ready to read more, more product options are revealed the further they scroll down, to assist them in finding a product suitable for their needs.
IL Tirmaisu store Home page on Shopify. Play with full prototype here.
#7 Email lead generation
As an online store, email marketing was crucial for us to obtain customer information, the stage of their conversion in the funnel, and to personalize suggestions based on their past shopping behaviour.
For example, in the Welcome flow after a user subscribes through the website to receive their free monthly tiramisu, a “Welcome to the IL Tiramisu family! ❤️” email is sent out with the free tiramisu discount code which customers can use with any purchase.
However, if customers for any reason do not redeem the code and make a purchase within 3 days of opening the first email (LHS), we send another email with suggested products to shop and customer favourites (centre). The last email (RHS) for customers who still do not budge is a product recommendation quiz to let customers tailor-pick a product right for them.
#8 Google analytics
Over time, the IL Tiramisu website gained increasingly more traffic with the help of social media, email lead traffic, and consistently updated SEO with new products. Optimising our Instagram, Facebook, and Google Businesses “shop front” lead to a higher number of visitors to our Shopify website, whereas customer loyalty programs, social proof and discounts pushed customers down the funnel to checkout their cart and recommend our products to others.
The total number of pages visited per session increased by 7.94% over the months of heavy marketing activity between August and December 2021. Our bounce rate (number of users who exit our website), also decreased by 7.51% over these months as UX improvements were made and content relevancy increased.
Our top page views included the landing page, cart, our tiramisu menu page, and our contact information page for customer inquiries. From this, we can deduce that customers usually spend more time choosing between products that are regarded as similar - such as different flavours of tiramisus, hence leading to greater time spent in the session. However, the bounce rate on this tiramisu menu page is also one of the highest at 61.54%, as a possible area of improvement.
As our kitchen runs with 1 chef who also delivers the desserts, one of the biggest challenges we faced as a team was to balance customer order size with time spend on delivery. To solve this, we focused our efforts on generating location-specific traffic (customers who lived within 5km of Melbourne were our most accessible market). The increasing SEO ranking for “tiramisu cake melbourne”, “tiramisu delivery melbourne” and “tiramisu melbourne” greatly shows the efficiency of simple alt-text, headlines, and targeted location-based promotion using Facebook ads.
Results
Shopify store front with 6% conversion rate, $2k/month sales (Aug-Dec 2021)
Welcome email flow with 65% open rate
+800 followers on Instagram, +180 followers on Facebook
Optimised paid Facebook ads to as low as $0.06 per click
Helped a very happy local business owner launch his online store and sell his handmade tiramisus during the peaks of Covid-19 and lockdowns in Melbourne.