Ecommerce Ties That Bind: How Spiral is Building a Full-Service Ecommerce Experience
How to build a winning SEO strategy and the reasoning behind creating content now that pays off big later
The binding and laminating business doesn’t sound like it would be ripe with insights for those in the eCommerce world. Jeff McRitchie, VP of eCommerce at Spiral, is here to prove that assumption wrong.
McRitchie has been with Spiral for almost a year, but he’s been in the world of binding for a long time. Prior to joining Spiral, he co-founded and ran the eCommerce department of MyBinding.com, which Spiral acquired in 2019. With MyBinding, McRitchie says they were more focused on purely eCommerce, and those are the skills that he’s putting into practice as he tries to digitally transform Spiral, which has less of a digital footprint.
“Our approach is to allow customers to interact with us the way they want to interact with us by giving them better options,” McRitchie says. “The priorities for this past year have been to try to integrate systems and then upgrade our footprint so that we can allow the company to put its best foot forward, starting with the E-comm side and getting everybody on the same platform and then tied into the same systems.”
Building out a new eCommerce platform is a lot of work, and McRitchie and his team are making their way through the re-platforming experience to create an even better version of the eComm shop than ever before. But in the meantime, Spiral is thriving with its longtime customers, while MyBinding customers are also rolling through and placing orders. Every day there are new potential customers discovering the company and the Spiral team has to continuously figure out the best way to serve them.
McRitchie says that on the eCommerce side of the business, that question is what drives the work they do. There are so many leads coming in through the top of the funnel, Spiral needs to find a way to sort through them all and filter them to the products and account managers that would suit them best. It’s a system that would be great in theory, but what does that look like in practice?
“What does it take for us to build a really cool robust system to not only bring these leads in but then to try to figure out how do I score these leads and then not only take them and turn them into an immediate sale, but to determine which ones of these really can be turned into those more traditional B2B accounts that we have these deep relationships with that are going to buy from us for years to come?” McRitchie asks.
The answer involves using new technology like A.I., machine learning, and elements of personalization where they can best fit. McRitchie also says that conversion depends on if and how the company can meet the needs of the customer, which depends on answering the fundamental question of can you solve my problem?
“Building to that has been a really great acquisition model for us — to build around the idea that every customer that comes to us comes to us with a problem that we can solve for them, and then figuring out how do you work backwards to that,” McRitchie says. “What problems could we solve? Then as you start to get creative with that and build massive amounts of content, that content lives out there forever. That’s been really a big part of our success, the longevity but also the content generation machine that we’ve built over the years.”
Much of the content Spiral puts out revolves around educating the customers. There are how-to videos and detailed descriptions of products so that potential buyers know exactly what they are getting and how to use their new item. That content is not only beneficial to the customers, but it serves an important function from a sales perspective as well.
Even though most customers discover the how-to videos and other content post purchase, McRitchie views content creation as a long-term customer acquisition strategy.
“You look at it and say, it’s not going to win us the sale today, but it will win us brand awareness,” he explains. “It does potentially when you do supply sales. Because we’re a very supply-driven space. If you think about it, if you buy a binding machine, you’ve got to buy some supplies for it. Long term, we want to have awareness and be in front of customers so they understand who we are when it comes time to buy the supplies that they need.”
Return customers are the lifeblood of any business, especially one that is going through the process of moving more and more transactions online. McRitchie is leading the journey toward a more fully-integrated eCommerce experience for all customers in the Spiral family. To hear more about it, check out his episode of Up Next in Commerce, here.
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