Tattly was founded by Tina Roth Eisenberg (a.k.a. Swissmiss in 2011). Much to her original team of three’s delight, the collection of 15 artful temps gained overnight success thanks to her loyal blog readers. Over eight years later, we knew from customer testimony that many of our repeat customers loved this about the Tattly brand, but we feared that newer customers were unaware of our origin story, which we felt was a big part of our brand ethos. We needed a way to differentiate ourselves from our big-box competitors without repeating our origin story again and again, leading to customer fatigue.
With this in mind, we tested out a new approach to our yearly Gift Guide during the 2019 holidays, featuring a new “Indie Gift Guide” of all designy goods by small business owners.
The 2019 holiday Indie Gift Guide showed strong CTR and revenue. Bolstered by the results from this test, we put our heads together to develop a content series that would highlight the stories of creative entrepreneurs, who, like Tina, were running sustainable small businesses in the design & gift space.
#SmallBusinessTaturday
A content series highlighting the brand stories of fellow small businesses we admire.
Goals:
- To re-establish Tattly as a female-led small business, differentiating ourselves from new competitors
- To highlight new designs in a creative, non-salesy way, by having fellow small business owners model Tattly
- To gain exposure to our partner’s followers, who would likely be like-minded buyers
Key Performance Indicators:
- Series Email Open Rates
We aimed for 3% above our average open rate, segmenting out repeated non-opens after each campaign.
- Time Spent on Page
We benchmarked our Artist Interview Series as a baseline for the average time spent on page.
- New and Returning Customer Orders
We continued our regular campaign emails, but monitored sales for this content series closely, to see if a more editorial content strategy might eventually overthrow typical sales emails.
Timeline:
Monthly Features throughout 2020
Content package to be shared by partners
- 1 photographic feature with the small business owner sporting their Tattly
- 1 Email with a teaser and gallery of featured Tattly
- 1 Instagram Story under #SmallBusinessTaturday Highlight
- 3-6 Instagram Feed Posts with interesting pull quotes
- 3-6 Twitter posts thanking Small Business Owner and highlighting their work
Results:
The series launched in early 2020 and was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which shifted the team’s focus toward more immediate response content — tattoo packs and at-home activities for kids during stay-home orders. While the pandemic disrupted the editorial calendar, Tattly’s sales held strong through the winter of 2020. The community goodwill built through content like #SmallBusinessTaturday likely contributed to that resilience. Customers who feel connected to a brand’s story don’t disappear when the news cycle does.