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Building on a Cheeky Brand's Social Media Success with Disruptivos

How Málaga, Spain‑based agency Disruptivos helped Pedrita Parker capitalize on her social media success and refine her digital marketing strategy.

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Pedrita Parker is afraid of chickens. Well, maybe. On the “About me” page of her website, she lists 5 truths and a lie, so it’s not entirely clear which is the fib.

What is apparent, though, is that her sidekick Mindy—a rotund little pup—never leaves Pedrita’s side when she paints. “She toots in the studio, but we adore her,” Pedrita says.

If jokes about scary chickens and noxious odors appeal to you, then you’ll love Pedrita, née Estefi Martinez, because she creates “designs with a lot of love and little shame.” Born in a small village in beautiful Málaga, Spain, Pedrita has an online shop that features her illustrations as well as nearly 300 other products, most of which are tinged with her cheeky sense of humor.

Pedrita’s far-reaching influence doesn’t end there: Her Instagram account boasts more than 130,000 followers. And because of the illustrator’s friendly tone, many think of her (and her community) like distant friends.

“They trust her and the message that she sends,” says Javier Moral, a consultant at Disruptivos, an 8-person agency that was first founded in 2011. “But we started to notice that the reach of her posts using social media marketing was decreasing.”

She’d invested a lot of time and money into this audience, so they got to work. To bolster her online presence, Disruptivos focused on 2 email marketing objectives: loyalty and conversion.

The first hurdle: persuasion

“In Spain, email marketing is not a big trend or being well-considered, because most companies are focused on acquisition and growing,” Javier says. “They are starting to realize the potential that it has.”

More specifically, segmentation, or sending relevant content to people separated into particular groups, hasn’t quite caught on yet, says María Ortiz. María is in charge of customer relationship management strategy, loyalty, and email marketing campaigns. “They don’t know that [segmentation] exists. They are sending email to everybody all the time. Same content, same time.”

“When you try to tell them about [segmentation], try to convince them about the benefits, they’re kind of agnostic about it,” Javier adds.

But when the team is asked to show numbers, they’re able to demonstrate a track record of email marketing success, especially with marketing automations like a welcome series or abandoned cart emails. “So we believe that email marketing in Spain has a lot of space to grow.”

The second hurdle: building an audience

When Pedrita reached out to Disruptivos, she needed little convincing that she’d have to capitalize on the reach of her social networks, which have always been her main source of traffic. The team knew that to bolster conversion rates, they’d have to encourage her followers to share her illustrations on Facebook and Instagram, interact with her products, and come back time and time again to see everything new that she had created.

In other words, they needed to foster loyalty—and they needed to do it in a place where they could take each fan into consideration.

The next logical step was to have her followers sign up for her email list. After setting up Mailchimp, Disruptivos recommended Pedrita activate a pop-up signup form on her website to siphon users’ email addresses into a handy database. Yes, some consider pop-ups a nuisance, the team admits, but it’s a system that works. Especially if you’re witty with the message, and, of course, never occupy the entire screen on a mobile device.

Because Pedrita’s audience is eager to hear about her next move, the team decided to entice subscribers with deals or news of special events.

After setting up the pop-up, the number of people in Pedrita’s list jumped from 850 to a whopping 16,500.

In addition to the pop-up tactic, the Disruptivos team also made use of Mailchimp’s landing pages feature to build up Pedrita’s audience prior to the launch of new products. Through organic posts on Facebook and Instagram, they drove her customers to special registration pages to build excitement and encourage signups.

The final leap: a campaign calendar

Now that they had an audience on a platform with a database, they could proceed to the second step: the illustrator’s email marketing strategy. To define that strategy, Disruptivos had to determine the different campaigns they’d need to send during the next few months. They took a large array of aspects into consideration, such as the type of audience, seasonality, various festivities, releases, promotions, and blog posts, to name a few.

First, the team rolled out automations, including a welcome series and abandoned cart, which helped introduce new subscribers to Pedrita—and remind them what they left behind in their shopping cart to recapture sales and generate more revenue. Just moments after sending the first email, “Five minutes later we were already selling,” Javier says.

One of their most successful campaigns, however, came out of last year’s Black Friday sale. Using social media to advertise that something huge was going to happen, fans had to subscribe to the Pedrita newsletter, which boosted registration before the big day.

When Black Friday arrived, fans were alerted that Pedrita’s famous shop had steep discounts of up to 50% off select items in a special newsletter. To further capture sales, the team sent another funny newsletter with “grace and affection” announcing that the sale was extended until Cyber Monday.

The results: 2016 vs. 2017

Having run this Black Friday campaign for 2 years, Disruptivos noticed a 38% increase in conversion, 9% increase in transactions, and 95% increase in income. Overall, their email marketing strategy has yielded a 175% increase in transactions and 123% increase in income.

“All the campaigns that we have done with Disruptivos have been a success,” Pedrita writes, because they advise you on how they can work better and know how to perfectly shape the ideas you have. “Once the campaign is sent, they also help you with the marketing analytics to see what things can be improved with the next newsletter. All of this makes working with them very easy.”

That harmony goes both ways.

“We speak like her, because she has a very special tone, and we have to think the same way as her,” María says. “She gets responses sometimes from the letters, like ‘Haha, you’re funny!’ That’s very cool."

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