hampers.com Digital PR Agency Case Study

TLDR

Introduction to our Digital PR work for Hampers.com

hampers.com are an e-commerce brand that offer luxury food and drink hampers for all occasions, helping people around the world build emotional connections through gifting.

When hampers.com initially approached 10 Yetis for marketing and digital PR assistance, the company was known as hamper.com and they had a new Managing Director at the helm; the team were looking for a complete brand overhaul in order to drive the company forwards and become better known as experts in gifting - not just for birthdays and key events throughout the year, but for any occasion.

As we were pitching, the pandemic began to take a grip of the world - people were unable to see their loved ones and online shopping became the go-to means for ordering pretty much anything.

We were able to hit the ground running with a Digital PR campaign in the lead up to Mother’s Day, ensuring people were aware of the luxury hampers they could order for their mums (or mother figures) and have delivered direct to her door. It was a strange time for all of us - both within our personal and professional lives - and it was incredibly heart-warming to be kicking off a new partnership with a brand that helped to spread joy at such a trying time.

The success of the initial campaign cemented our partnership together. We spent two years helping to increase brand awareness for hampers.com, boosting their SEO and generating an extensive range of pieces of coverage, product reviews, backlinks and mentions, as well as trackable sales and the odd TV interview.

Brief

We all know there are a few key gifting opportunities throughout the year: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Easter, Father’s Day and Christmas, alongside birthdays and special occasions (getting engaged and/or married, passing your driving test, graduating university and so on). But the team at hampers.com wanted a PR campaign that would be switched on all year round, ensuring they were more than just a seasonal gifting company.

It was important that we worked together to highlight the idea that you didn’t need an occasion to treat a loved one, or even to treat yourself.

With a brand refresh in the pipeline though, we needed to factor this in to everything we did - and it brought about a lot of extra work too, such as writing copy for the upcoming new website (not that we’re complaining - it’s always fun to get creative and do something outside of the normal day-to-day PR activities).

We’ve been bringing joy to gifting for more than 40 years, so you could say that we know a thing or two about making the...
Posted by hampers.com on Friday, 13 November 2020

What we did

During the first (almost) year of working with the luxury hamper company, we did a lot more than just PR - although this case study will largely cover off the PR campaign as that was where the bulk of our work was.

In the beginning, with the brand refresh on the horizon, our brilliant team of PR specialists, social media specialists and content writers pulled together brand strategies and a whole new tone of voice. Following this, we rewrote new copy for the entire website and every product on it.

Standard PR work carried on alongside this though. While the website was gearing up for a complete overhaul, it was still important to generate high quality coverage and backlinks that would move over as the website URL changed, ensuring it bounced back much quicker than it would in its current form.

Before, during and after the brand refresh, we worked hard to ensure PR activity remained consistent and that hampers.com was being discussed with any and all relevant journalists - whether we were offering them samples for their upcoming gift guides, enlightening them on a data-led press release that might work well for them and their readers, or were looking to team up on exclusive articles, comments and case studies.

There were some key reactive opportunities throughout the campaign too. The lead up to Christmas 2020 was a great example; we were facing another lockdown, everyone was panic buying and personal finance and retail experts were in the news talking about how you should shop early for Christmas to avoid being disappointed. Not only because many were still cautious about venturing onto the high street, but also because online shopping was much more commonplace than in previous years.

Whenever there was a story along these lines in the news, we issued a reactive comment - this started as early as September and saw us generate coverage with the Daily Mirror, MSN and a plethora of regional news outlets. It was this reactive PR campaign that saw us secure an interview slot for Patrick, the Managing Director, on BBC Oxford.

In a bid to do more than just talk about gifting during key seasons, our efforts were also focused on bringing attention to other key relationships in our lives - from how many of us consider our colleagues to be our best friends, through to how to navigate gifting in a corporate world.

Even our product focus didn’t always lie on key gifting dates in the calendar. For example, in October 2021, hampers.com launched two brand new and exclusive Lotus Biscoff hampers and it was our job to ensure the new collaboration generated as much buzz as possible. We arranged a number of product samples to be sent to journalists and generated coverage on the likes of the Evening Standard, Yahoo!, the Metro and Delish, to name just a few publications.

The results

The very first campaign we did for hampers.com was geared around Mother’s Day, at the very start of the first UK lockdown. The world as we knew it was changing, but this was the perfect time for e-commerce businesses to market themselves. We had a little over one week to make this campaign a success; we used our journalist relationships to secure gift guide inclusions, and we also supplied journalists with tips on how to celebrate Mother’s Day while apart and a note on how hampers.com were offering Sunday delivery for the very first time, with 5% of Mother’s Day sales going to charities that support the homeless and most vulnerable.

Our very first campaign together achieved coverage on the Metro, the Sun, the Daily Star, Tyla, Good Housekeeping, UK Fundraising, a bunch of regional publications and more!

Not a bad start.

In the two years that we worked together it was a regular thing to see such fantastic results.

But how did the campaign fare overall?

Firstly, we generated a very nice 1,267 pieces of coverage; the brand was consistently featured on national news sites, and we can’t forget the golden BBC interview!

Most notably, however, we generated 2,476 backlinks to hampers.com.

You might be wondering how (or why) we can claim to have 95% more links than separate pieces of coverage. It’s simple: hampers.com are an e-commerce brand and, therefore, while a large part of our focus was to generate high quality backlinks to the brand’s homepage, it was also a big focus for us to generate links to both category and product pages. I can show you article after article either entirely dedicated to hampers.com (where multiple products are featured) or where various products are included as part of a wider roundup.

With access to the company’s Google Analytics account, we were also able to track how successful the PR results were for the brand - as long as there was a link back, of course.

At the end of November / start of December 2021 - as our Christmas campaign was well under way - we were able to see that PR coverage had driven just under 20% of all traffic to the website over a seven-day period. Considering the sheer size of the brand and how many visitors they have to their site day in, day out, this was an impressive achievement.

And did we mention the thousands of pounds worth of sales we were able to directly attribute back to our PR activities and efforts? Well, now we have.

The countdown to Christmas has started! So why not take a little inspiration from us to find the perfect hand picked...
Posted by hampers.com on Friday, 6 November 2020

Summary of the campaign

hampers.com approached us for a multitude of marketing activities shortly after the company took on a new management team and were setting their sights on a brand refresh, transitioning from hamper.com to hampers.com and moving away from solely being a seasonal gifting company.

As a great example of ROI from public relations campaigns, and with product PR at the core of the activity, alongside data-led press releases, feature articles, reactive statements and larger campaign activations, 10 Yetis were able to successfully raise brand awareness and positive sentiment, boost SEO, drive thousands of pounds worth of sales and increase the brand’s customer base.

Testimonial

"Samantha and the team at 10 Yetis have achieved international coverage for our gifts. When we launched ‘Just Because’ in February 2022 – our campaign to send free hampers each month to recipients nominated by their friends and family – the team secured a wealth of additional coverage, bringing in new traffic to our website and increasing awareness of our brand. 10 Yetis understand the importance of data in e-commerce, and their weekly reports allow us to measure results at a glance."

- Amelia Fletcher, Marketing Director, hampers.com

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