How Poster & Paw Became Australia’s Top Pet Portrait Ecommerce

Poster & Paw eternalises and celebrates the unconditional love we share with our pets through high-end portraits that perfectly capture any pet’s personality.

Born at the end of 2021, in less than two years, they became one of the industry’s leading names in Australia, being the original Watercolour Experts, offering only original styles printed on fine art papers, with over 900+ 5-star reviews on their first year in business.

The pet industry has some of the most competitive niches in ecommerce, and the pet portrait market is a testament to that. Poster & Paw had to start from scratch against dozens of new brands and a handful of giants already established in the industry.

Poster & Paw is, to this day, a small local business, so the team had to keep a fantastic product & customer service while aiming to scale. That requires a lot of divided attention to all the cogs of the engine that would allow the brand to supercharge its sales and win more market share.

Pet Portraits isn’t an industry where repeat orders occur naturally, and we can’t acquire new customers forever. So, to make the business genuinely profitable, there’s a need to overcome the challenge of bringing customers back to order again and also spread the word.

In the current age of online advertising for ecommerce, the customer journey needs to be second to none across every primary channel where your avatar can be found. That reality only becomes more significant with each month that goes by — We understood and validated that hypothesis in practice across many tests in each platform.

This is how the Harpia Method allowed Poster & Paw to surpass their ecommerce competitors and become the top pet portrait store in Australia:

Foundation Track: Analyze the business, market, and avatars to develop a thorough ecommerce marketing plan with the Ecommerce Growth Blueprint.

Growth Track: Architect a multi-channel advertising ecommerce strategy to acquire customers and increase brand awareness on Meta and Google.

Maximization Track: Maximize customer value with email marketing automation and a robust content calendar to constantly engage their list using Klaviyo.

Harpia operates with a clearly defined three-step method that includes Strategy, Growth and Retention, and it was this approach that was applied with Poster & Paw:

The first step was to ensure we understood our brand, customers, and acquisition channels. We began by advertising on Google, so all significant searches related to the niche allowed users to find Poster & Paw in the top-ranking search ads while building a structure of multiple social ad tests to discover what truly resonates with the audience. By that, we mean good KPIs and the ability to gather real people to relate and engage with the ad.

Doing that from scratch with fewer content options is challenging. While overcoming that, all basic flows were established so the first customers could enjoy a great experience.

Building a solid advertising presence led us to test multiple winner offers and our brand positioning, which we later used to grow their acquisition and ecommerce lifecycle marketing strategies.

With a solid advertising foundation, it was time to build upon that, steadily growing and dominating Top-Of-Funnel media, becoming the top #2 Google Shopping product & validating avatars, offers & narratives. All while improving the journey and website, one critical touchpoint at a time, and deepening all trust signals available to us.

One of the top future trends for advertising is user-generated content (a.k.a. UGCs). Everyone is drawn to relatable content, and no one does that better than customers themselves; our next big step was finding the incentive for customers to review us and share their content gladly.

After building trust levers and achieving a consistent funnel (people joining from acquisition channels, capturing interest throughout other channels, ordering, and interacting with the brand afterwards), the mission was to ensure every lead was being correctly Nurtured and educated by the brand’s communication — the right message, at the right time, to help pet lovers stick around and be in the loop.

This means Pop-Ups, Lead Generation, Welcome / Nurture / Abandoned Flows, Dynamic Retargeting, Image Ads and Google Banners, Search Ads, UGC images and videos, and more. All of that is synced under the same brand positioning statement, constantly evolving until we are confident that people love everything they’re in contact with.

Over a year, every ecommerce business has natural Peaks of interest (and therefore revenue) from the customer, moments where people are more prone to consider and buy. Our job is to leverage that upward spiral momentum and use it to scale and overcome competitors while having killer contingencies for the valleys in a way that generates our momentum to maintain performance so when the next peak of sales arrives, instead of a deep valley, we’re coming from stability, leading to long-term growth.

The “down periods” are also ideal for going All-In on A/B Testing to improve the content, find new angles, perfect the copy & positioning statement, expand on the trust signals, build strategies to get customers to order again, new offers (and products), custom flows, etc.

Harpia’s proven ecommerce growth strategy helped Poster & Paw become Australia’s top pet portrait ecommerce brand. By focusing on business fundamentals, such as validating the brand and offers, understanding the customers, automating an engaging email marketing experience, and collecting hundreds of UGCs and reviews, Poster & Paw turned a passion into a leading ecommerce business.

If your brand excels at the basics — product & offer, service & experience, and journey & funnels — and you put in the work, then all that is needed is the step-by-step of Harpia’s Method.

Harpia is an ecommerce growth agency merging human relationship psychology with intuitive technology. The Harpia Method has helped ecommerce stores skyrocket sales with an effective customer journey, sales funnel and kick-ass digital marketing strategies.