About the Brand
Founded in 2004, Art of Tea is a vertically integrated tea company that blends and packages all of their tea in-house, selling to both retail and wholesale customers. In their words, it's “a labor of love” and with a team of fewer than twenty-five members including production, Art of Tea is a lean, mean, tea brewin’ machine.
How their mobile website just wasn’t cutting it
Prior to using Tapcart's mobile app builder, Hanna Houglum, the Executive Director of Growth and Strategy at Art of Tea, was facing an issue all too common in today’s mobile landscape. Art of Tea’s acquisition strategy was fairly standard and was heavily dependent on leveraging Facebook ads to raise awareness. On the plus side, it was effective in getting new users to the website, but unfortunately, once users arrived at the domain there was a shift in behavior and interest. Conversions simply did not match up to the traffic they were receiving.
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The #1 reason they decided to launch a mobile shopping app
From the day Hanna was introduced to Tapcart, she was immediately interested. The brand had a long history of loyal customers devoted to the brand and she wanted to give those shoppers a unique and premium user experience. Their mobile website just didn’t ladder up.
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Hanna knew that creating a channel where conversion, retention, and average order frequency were likely to outperform the website would ultimately significantly impact GMV. Still, her primary motivation to create an app was to offer a personalized channel that was true to Art of Tea’s motto: treat every customer like they’re your only customer.
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How they got tons of mobile app downloads
After deciding she wanted to give Art of Tea’s loyal community a VIP sales channel, it was time to market the app. First, they had a soft launch, offering a discount code for feedback so they can understand how their community liked the experience. Not only was it easy to get Art of Tea's top shoppers to download the app, but swaths of one-time and fairly new shoppers were also willing to adopt the channel.
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How they doubled their sales during the COVID-19 pandemic
Art of Tea launched their app in July 2020 and much had changed. Hanna managed the app along with many other responsibilities and in her words, a brand only needs a “sixteenth of a person” to manage the app. The results in terms of GMV were, for lack of a better word, insane.
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Art of Tea’s advice to Shopify merchants looking to create a mobile app
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