Copywriting that helped a Dutch ecommerce brand win over the UK.

The problem

Smellacloud is a fast-growing health and wellness company selling aroma diffusers, essential oils, herbal tea and skintox. Founders Tamsyn Graanoogst and Robert Marousseev built it on quality products from ethically sourced manufacturers, fair prices and customer support that makes shopping online stress-free. Their Dutch site, geurwolkje.nl⁠, has more than 3,300 five-star reviews.

They opened a UK webshop in February 2020. Sales started at £500 in the first month and grew to £1,500 by June. Everything shipped from the Netherlands, so in June 2020 Robert opened an office in London and set up the supply chain in Swindon.

The paperwork was straightforward. The website was not. As Robert put it, capturing the brand’s message and personality was easy in Dutch, their native language. The real challenge was turning it into English that would win over UK customers and outrank competitors in search.

The approach

In late May 2020 I was hired to upgrade the website with a new message strategy and SEO optimized pages. The first job was realigning the message for the UK market. I reimagined the overall brand message, giving it a fresh feel built on the core personality developed in Dutch, then applied it to the homepage, the about page and the product pages.

Once those pages were live, Smellacloud invested in influencer marketing and remarketing ads to speed up sales. The new growth paid for the next step: dedicated pages that told a deeper story about where the products came from and their quality.

After keyword research, we targeted the searches around four product pages:

• Aroma diffusers
• Essential oils
• Herbal tea
• Skintox

The goal was to give shoppers enough information to buy with confidence, and to make those pages part of a longer SEO strategy.

What I wrote

New messaging for the homepage, about page and product pages, four SEO product story pages, the copy for the 2020 Black Friday ad campaign, and the popup copy that went with it.

The results

The UK store started at £500 in its first month. This is the store analytics for 1 January to 18 November 2020, compared with the same dates in 2019:

• 38,677 online shopping sessions, up 2,263%.
• £38,009.42 in total sales, up 3,022%.
• Over the first two to three months after the new pages, sales rose from about 2K to an average of around 6K a month, with influencer marketing and remarketing ads running alongside the new copy.
• By January 2021 the UK store was past £15K a month.

Black Friday 2020

Q4 was always their best season, so Robert asked me to help with the Facebook ad campaign. We started with a test, varying images and ad copy. In the first 24 hours the ads generated £15,500.03 in combined sales from the Dutch and UK stores.

After a few adjustments to the UK campaign, the week of 23 to 29 November produced £3,899 in sales from ads and £2,510 from email marketing.

The campaign was so successful that they ran out of stock within 48 hours. I wrote new popup copy to collect email addresses for a back in stock email with 21% off store wide, and email subscriptions rose 65%.

Robert said the main reason they could not sell more during Black Friday was the stock shortage, and that they beat their sales projections by a large margin compared with the Dutch store’s first Black Friday.

What comes next

The UK store was the start of a larger plan. The Dutch side stays strong, and Robert and Tamsyn aimed to scale the UK operation to €100K a month by 2022.