Case Study

Cole Supplies

60,000 years of culture meets digital strategy

Dialing up digital to tell a story

Cole Supplies approached Cannings Purple to develop an e-commerce platform and holistic digital strategy to launch the new Cole Supplies brand and promote the expansion of its product offering from being solely a workwear company to also including industrial supplies and custom requests via strategic sourcing.

Cannings Purple identified and developed content pillars and themes that have formed the backbone of Cole Supplies social media strategy and brought these to life through engaging content production for social media and digital platforms.

The challenge

Cole Supplies had a variety of online, disparate platforms and a disjointed digital strategy. The previous corporate website was tired and no longer suitable to deliver on the new business strategy. The e-commerce environment had inconsistent brand representation coupled with a clunky user experience that was overwhelming and confusing for visitors searching for products.

Our approach

Cannings Purple’s Design and Digital team worked seamlessly to develop the following solutions for Cole Supplies:

Website: A new sitemap and information architecture strategy was developed with a design and user experience delivered using the popular and easy-to-use Wordpress platform. More than 90 products are categorised and available for sale via the new Cole Supplies website with Cole Supplies staff able to update content and products themselves with ease and efficiency.

Email: To assist in driving traffic and new customers to the website, email templates were developed to mirror the new website design and effectively display featured products. The Cole Supplies email platform shifted from being solely a mechanism to inform customers of new products and evolved into a platform to share blogs and new articles that showcased the brand pillars and community involvement of Cole Supplies.

Social Media and content production: Cannings Purple introduced a robust and efficient social media management ecosystem to ensure a logical and timely flow of content was displayed across the owned social media channels of Cole Supplies. This solution brought structure and the ability to plan for coming weeks of sales campaigns. It also meant Cole Supplies could now develop thought leadership content in the form of environment, community engagement and PPE education around cornerstone sales content to engage its audience

Our results

The Coles Supplies website was launched in November 2020 with significant increases in website visitors, time spent on site and lowered bounce rates. The site attracted inbound enquiries through smart contact forms that integrated with the Cole Supplies Mailchimp email platform.

Social media engagement soared and importantly has been one of the primary traffic sources for the Cole Supplies website, allowing Cole Supplies to reach a wider audience and appeal to new customers that previously did not interact with the business.

Outcomes

The new website has enabled Cole Supplies to own its digital real-estate, attract new customers, and be positioned as a readily available supplier of workwear and industrial supplies to Australian businesses.

The consistency and quality of digital and social media content has communicated the points of differences and brand values of Cole Supplies in a crowded and highly competitive market segment.

It’s been very well received. We’ve seen a growth in our business and in our professionalism and presence online.

Gordon Cole, Cole Supplies CEO