Situation

Norwegian Baked uses traditional family recipes to bake crispbread (knekkebrød) in its Brooklyn bakery space. The business has enjoyed solid growth with wholesale partners who resell the crispbread nationwide. Norwegian Baked is also enjoying promising success from their Etsy storefront, with over 3,000 unique orders and rave reviews. Due to these products being so specific, the search terms around them are very intentional, and as a result, the conversion rates are high; in other words, a large percentage of people who visit the Etsy shop convert to paying customers. On the other hand, the specific product terms are limiting in bringing in new traffic or introducing non-Nordics to Norwegian Baked’s products. ITAC partnered with Norwegian Baked and initiated a project to optimize the Etsy store to increase both the organic traffic and the number of orders generated, while maintaining high conversion rates.

Solution

As the term “Knekkebrød” is incredibly specific, ITAC and its partners advised on techniques to pull in a wider demographic and introduce the product to a new customer base. We kicked off this project with a visual refresh. The storefront organization was optimized, and updated branding and images helped to highlight some of the many ways this traditional snack can be used in American homes.

Fresh products were also created to further expand keywords and listings. New titles and product images helped capture a broader audience on both new and existing product listings, and further testing was completed on adjacent keywords. These new terms focused on health benefits, snacks and recipes that call for crackers, and other unique benefits that introduced Knekkebrød to a wide variety of consumers.

Results

As with any other online campaign, it’s important to continuously experiment and optimize. To help track this testing process and progress, templates were created for long-term research and expansion purposes. The Norwegian Baked team was left with new knowledge of listing format templates, research techniques, and other optimization skills to take control of their process.

Tests ran for 4 weeks and after this time, results were recorded and additional edits were completed. Impacts from this project were immediate, and the team was excited by the initial results. Below are the year over year comparisons:

• 38% increase in store visits
• 19.3% increase in number of sales
• 19.2% increase in sales revenue
• 8.2% order conversion rate

As Norwegian Baked continues to grow their D2C sales channel, such improvements, combined with training on how to independently optimize their store, will have long term impacts on their growth trajectory.