037: William May Jewellers’ Jonny Lomax discusses doubling Christmas sales in a difficult product category

Jonny Lomax is eCommerce and Marketing Manager at William May Jewellers. William May has been involved in the British jewellery industry for 190 years(!), they sell vintage jewellery specialising in luxury watches, and diamond engagement rings. The website has been live for 18 months and in the first year they turned over £220,000, including a doubling of Nov/Dec business.

Click to Tweet: William May’s Jonny Lomax – how to increase customer engagement with great customer service @eComMasterPlan #podcast

About the business

• eCommerce Business Structure – Boutique Bricks and Clicks
• Product Range Scale – niche
• On a Visualsoft platform
• Based in the UK, selling mainly in the UK
• 40 people in the business across 6 stores – 2 people working on the eCommerce team
• Key widgets in the website:
  • Trust Pilot – for reviews
  • Sage Pay – for payments / fraud prevention
  • Zopim – customer service chat system
  • Mailchimp – for email

Listen to hear how Jonny Lomax got started in eCommerce

Most Awesome Thing Right Now

Jonny is most excited by the level of customer service William May can offer their customers – he is proud of the additional value they offer. This is demonstrated by the fact that William May have been selling on line for 18 months and have only received one complaint – that was really outside of their control.

Listen to hear more about selling bespoke products online. 

On the Radar for the Coming Months

After a busy Christmas period, first on Jonny’s to do list is to analyse the sales and traffic data. Looking at the customers they currently have and the potential for repeat business as well as looking at ways to attract new customers. Key to this is developing their email list and revisiting their social media channels.

3 Tips for Getting First time Visitors to Trust you

As a business selling very visual, personal high value you items it is imperative that William May build trust with potential clients – here are Jonny’s top tips on how to do that.

• Offer a no hassle 30 day returns policy – and make sure you publicise it.
• Use a customer review system and feature it in a key place on your website – make sure no one can miss it.
• Invest a lot of time in creating product descriptions – make sure both your images and text really sell your products.

Top Tips for Online Jewellers

• Jonny believes that word of mouth is vital for building a trust – nothing beats a recommendation from someone you know. Using a reviews provider helps with this too and in the future William May’s will be creating e-mail marketing campaigns to encourage customers recommendations.
• William May’s use the majority of their marketing budget on Google Product Listing Ads – avoiding text ads as these are nowhere near as effective. They have found these are the most direct way to show products to the market, bring visuals and pricing into the mix.

You can hear about all this on the podcast, for free – right now…

eCommerce Book Top Tip

Clickology by Graham Jones

The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

Google shopping campaign – product listing adverts.

Tool Top Tip

Dropbox is vital to sharing information across William May’s 6 sites – they also use Trello for project management and organisation.

Start Up Top Tip

Jonny’s top tip for Start Ups is just to make sure you research your market before launching your business.

If your business didn’t exist, which eCommerce Business Would you like to be Running?

Jonny chooses Zappos he finds their focus on customer service and business culture inspire him. For more of an insight Zappos founder Tony Hsieh wrote the book [easyazon_link identifier=”145550890X” locale=”UK” tag=”ecommmaste-21″]Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose[/easyazon_link] or you can  look at the culture page of the Zappos website.

Interview Links

• William-may.co.uk
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Instagram
• Connect with Jonny on LinkedIn