Woodcock Smokery
Woodcock Smokery is an established fish smokery based in west Cork and run by Sally Barnes. The majority of her clients are exclusive delicatessans in Ireland and throughout the world, and her produce has established a high reputation. The business is very seasonal and christmas is the busy period with all production geared towards this time.
PEC Consulting was approached to provide quidance on how to create and manage more business. Sally had been running the business herself for many years but needed assistance to take it to the next level and increase sales and profitability.
Exposure to the market: The first step was to create a website in order to inform the public about the products on offer and enable customers searching online for quality seafood to discover Woodcock Smokery. The site would contain information on the history of the company, the processes used, the products and a recipes section, as well as information on organic fishing and fish farming which tied into Woodcock Smokery's philosophy of food preparation. As there may be regular updates, particularly to the recipes section, an open source content management system (Drupal) was chosen in order to allow easy management of web content by trained users.
Ecommerce enabled: The site is built around the products on offer, and users can add their desired quantities of fish to a shopping basket integrated with the CMS. The usual choices regarding shipping options are available to the user, who then submits the purchase and pays through Paypal. The order is received by email, and packaged and sent out in a very short time by Sally and her staff.
Cash flow: Traditionally the business operated on a “send invoice and wait for payment” basis - ecommerce meant that we were able to capture the transaction at point of sale. A customer can order products online and must provide credit card details; then the funds are processed and transferred to a holding account within seconds of the customer clicking submit. The customer is then notified of their order details by email and given a tracking number which they can use to keep an eye on the status of their order on the website or by phone.
Customer base: Users of the web must enter details when purchasing products such as delivery address and email. We ask whether they would object to receiving further information on products, and if they do not this allows us to target our sales efforts. We also operate a call back system in which some customers are telephoned asking for any feedback on their experience.
Marketing: We perform a detailed weekly analysis of the website logs as part of our business services to Woodcock Smokery, and this has allowed us to streamline the content of the site in order to increase sales. For example, it was quickly noticed that almost 60% of visitors to the site were finding it through searching for recipes in various search engines. This enabled us to give more importance to the recipes section and place product links on various recipe pages, which has in turn resulted in an increase in sales from this search engine traffic.