EPP 156: Marketing For Luxury Brands With Raphael Paulin-Daigle

In this week’s episode of the Extra Paycheck Podcast I am joined by Raphael Paulin-Daigle, the CEO of SplitBase.

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The first time Raphael appeared as a guest on the Extra Paycheck Podcast was in February 2017 on episode # 101. In that episode we talked about conversion optimization and you should check out that episode as it has a lot of great and helpful information.

A year later I invited Raphael to come back to the show. In the past year his agency SplitBase had a lot of growth. More importantly Raphael niched down his business, more precisely his client base. SplitBase initially worked with saas (software as a service) companies, then moved to working with eCommerce businesses and finally settled on working with luxury brands.

While typical marketing strategies can work extremely well for most mass markets – they proved to be completely useless for luxury brands. Raphael realized that as he already worked with a few luxury fashion and lifestyle brands. He understood that high end brands needed a completely different approach to their marketing strategy and he was ready to help them out. SplitBase worked with such brands as Kiehl’s, BestSelf, L’Oréal and many others.

SplitBase concentrates on conversion optimization, in other words it helps companies increase their revenue by increasing their website conversions. Here are two very basic yet very powerful strategies that you can apply to your business today:

1. On the quantitative side: go into your Google Analytics account (please tell me you have it setup) and start digging deep. Don’t just look at your traffic numbers but understand the meaning behind these metrics. Where does that traffic comes from? Where it ends ups? Where it converts most, etc. Once you understand these numbers start building a strategy on improving these traffic sources, conversion pages, etc.

2. On the qualitative side: talk to your customers! Send them surveys and ask what they want to hear from you. You probably have a blog and your readers will tell you what kind of content they like the most. If possible, pick up the phone and call your customers or your leads. Have a conversation with them and this well help you understand what they really want and why they are or aren’t buying.

ANother awesome tip to help you increase conversions: use a heat map software on your website to understand where your customers click. I once doubled my conversions on a page by simply adding 1 link. Free HeatMap WordPress plugin helped me understand that a lot of people were clicking on an image that didn’t have a link attached to it. That simple (and stupid from my side). Raphael recommends HotJar for doing that. Remember that people might see and use your website completely differently from what you think.

SplitBase gets 80-90% of its new clients for referrals. The crazy thing, Raphael doesn’t even ask for them, they occur naturally. This allows Raphael to invest money and energy into providing better experiences to existing clients instead of spending money on advertising. Why does he get so many referrals? You’ll need to listen to the full episode to find out.

In today’s show we’re also talking about luxury loans in China, why we’re OK on spending $1,000+ on a new phone, why you should attend your industry’s conferences and meet-ups and a lot more!

Resources mentioned in today’s episode:

EPP 101: Conversion Optimization Secrets

The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands, Book by Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien

SplitBase – Official Website

SplitBase Blog

Raphael on Twitter

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