Ever wished to assemble your folks round a dinner desk and accuse them of homicide? Hopefully, your buddy group dynamic has by no means truly bought that darkish — however that’s the basic idea behind Purple Herring Video games’ homicide thriller video games! Teams get collectively, gown as much as match the setting of the sport — from the Orient Specific, to a Twenties home celebration — and play the characters assigned to them with the intention to guess the assassin of their midst.
Purple Herring Video games are masters at this idea and have received quite a few awards for his or her homicide thriller video games, together with the Small Awards: Dwelling and Away Award. They have been named one of many 2016 Prime 100 Small Enterprise Saturday winners which led to them exhibiting at No. 10 Downing Avenue (headquarters of the British Prime Minister).
Nonetheless, the onset of COVID-19 clearly made group gatherings troublesome and had a big impact on any enterprise fashions based mostly round internet hosting occasions. We talked to the “Chief Candlesitck Wielder,” Jo Smedley, about how having a WordPress web site has helped them to navigate the pandemic.
Why did you first determine to make use of WordPress for your enterprise web site?
We switched to WordPress a number of years in the past after we redesigned the web site — for the fourth time! We don’t promote an ordinary product, which meant we wanted a store that might have loads of data pages in addition to the flexibility to take a look at. We wrote an enormous wishlist for our web site designer and WordPress with its plugins did practically all the things on that checklist — and was far simpler to take care of and use from our facet than the opposite platforms we’d used beforehand.
How do you discover utilizing WooCommerce as your cost technique?
WooCommerce has been very easy to make use of and it’s by no means triggered us any points. We promote each bodily and downloadable merchandise and it handles supply of each actually simply.
In addition to promoting merchandise in your foremost Purple Herring Video games website, you may have a web site referred to as Cosy Killer, devoted to a subscription-based homicide thriller recreation. What are the benefits of that?
Subscription merchandise degree out the peaks and troughs in our seasonal enterprise (Christmas is our busiest time). It’s been our greatest growth within the final three years — and we’ve been capable of take our subscription website from a standing begin to buying and selling at an identical degree to our foremost enterprise inside simply three years. That isn’t to say we haven’t put a LOT of selling into it, and promoting prices have been excessive too — nevertheless it’s grown exponentially.
What’s your advertising and marketing technique for selling your websites?
We use a mixture of search engine optimization, paid-for Google AdWords, Fb advertisements, and extra conventional, free, social media posts, e mail campaigns, and piggyback advertising and marketing for the opposite companies we provide in with the mail order. We’ve additionally labored in tandem with loads of different small companies — inserting flyers into their mail order or working competitions collectively. The weblog can be a helpful technique to speak with potential prospects. We frequently signpost to articles we’ve written on the weblog to assist our subscription enterprise puzzle solvers, or for these on our celebration enterprise who’re searching for extra data. It additionally helps search engine optimization web page rating.
How have you ever tailored to the difficulties posed by COVID-19?
We had no thought how COVID-19 would have an effect on our enterprise and spent the primary 4 weeks of the outbreak seeing refund after refund going by way of the account. If it hadn’t been for the federal government grant on the finish of March I wouldn’t have had sufficient cash to pay my employees wages. We spent two weeks rethinking our web site technique and made some modifications to our WordPress website.
In early April, issues circled dramatically and we noticed gross sales in a six week interval that have been equal to a complete 12 months’s price of gross sales within the enterprise! It was loopy! We now have at all times offered downloadable video games, however up till the outbreak we’d seen a large shift from individuals preferring the boxed units to our downloadable variations. Through the outbreak, nobody was visiting retailers and the very fact all our video games have been downloadable was abruptly a large benefit as they enabled everybody to play remotely whereas in lockdown. The simplicity of our WordPress web site meant we have been quickly capable of revise our web site for this digital panorama and seize these gross sales after we wanted them.
We’ve additionally seen an enormous shift in our occasion bookings, with extra bookings for digital occasions than ever earlier than — and once more — that’s all due to us having the ability to revise the knowledge pages inside our web site shortly to comply with that new pattern.
Is there any recommendation you wish to supply new on-line entrepreneurs?
The perfect recommendation I can provide is to not overstock. Inventory is money you possibly can’t use. You would possibly suppose one thing will promote rather well, but when it doesn’t you’re caught with that money tied up in inventory too lengthy and it’ll trigger your enterprise money move points. Though you could be tricked into bulk shopping for as a result of the numbers look good — it’s truly higher to purchase in smaller portions and see much less revenue with the intention to preserve your money move wholesome. It’s even higher if you should purchase solely as soon as the orders are in — so search for suppliers who will work with you to ship on demand. That method you don’t maintain the inventory your self. It might be the distinction between making a 20% or a 50% revenue on an merchandise — however that’s 30% money you’re retaining in your enterprise.
Need to take your enterprise on-line? Begin a website at the moment: