As a leading digital marketing agency, DMi is committed to providing value to its clients and, given the current world crisis, wanted to deliver a new way to reach and engage with them. On April 7th, DMi held its first-ever webinar for its clients! The presentation was titled “Managing Rapid eCommerce Growth During a Global Pandemic” and focused on how one of our clients, Rastelli’s, is handling the changes to its business during this global crisis. Our CEO Pat Mckenna shared in-depth knowledge of the efforts Rastelli’s is conducting to provide an important and vital service during these tough times while instilling trust and reliability in its consumers. Weren’t able to make it? No worries, here is the rundown of what you missed!

The Set-Up

Rastelli’s started 44 years ago as a small butcher shop in New Jersey. Over those 44 years, Rastelli’s has grown into a global food distribution juggernaut as one of the largest producers of organic beef in the U.S. In April 2019, Rastelli’s launched direct-to-consumer meat and seafood delivery e-commerce platform. Over the first 11 months, business growth was modest but steadily increasing. As the COVID-19 pandemic began to ripple across the world, the company saw an incredible spike in online orders. A change in consumer demands caused the spike. Customers now had a high demand for food delivered to their door. This provides a much safer alternative than going out to a store. The ramp-up in sales offered several challenges and required the DMi and Rastelli’s teams to make important logistical and marketing changes. Although this case study is focused on the food industry, the underlying principles for success will resonate across any type of e-commerce business.

Connecting the Dots

We were able to have success due to our ability to connect customer demand with Rastelli’s supply through multiple marketing channels. We had to let people know that we were there. This focus on marketing allowed us to introduce ourselves to new customers as well as remind past customers of our product. Although we marketed in many ways including Paid Search and Paid Social, the three avenues we saw the most success in were:

• Partnerships
  • Our partners jumped at the opportunity to get their customers a much-needed service while at the same time increasing their revenue stream. We worked with partners, such as vegetable and fruit delivery companies, to cross-promote Rastelli’s meats which offered a compliment commodity to their products.
• Affiliate Marketing
  • DMi’s affiliate team was able to leverage their relationships with affiliate partners to promote Rastelli’s services on their sites. Consumers are more likely to trust these editorial contributors as experts in their areas of interest. This gave Rastelli’s some credibility to their quality of meat and top-notch customer service. Such sites included Food & Wine, Rolling Stone, CNN, USA Today, among many others.
• Email Marketing.
  • We initially thought Email Marketing would be an uphill battle due to our relatively small email database. Furthermore, the Rastelli’s shopping experience had changed from a subscription-based service to an a la carte menu focused on meat staples. We were able to have success by focusing our messaging that involves sharing and being clear about shifting our customer experience to fit the new needs of our customers.

Challenges Ensued

As orders ramped up, so did the many challenges. The first challenge we saw was with the inventory. We needed to make sure that product availability was still feasible during the negative production effects of the COVID-19 outbreak. Our Ecommerce Team decided to turn off products that were harder and more expensive to produce and shift the focus onto staple goods, such as chicken breasts, ground beef, shrimp, and salmon filets. The second challenge that presented itself was order logistics. The sheer quantity of orders coming in was challenging, and we had to keep up with the demand. As we shifted our site to staple goods, we needed to make sure that our packing and shipping process was still efficient. The third challenge was dealing with the geographical aspect of order fulfillment. All Rastelli’s products are perishable, so time to delivery was a huge concern. A few months ago, delivery times were reliable. Today? Not so much. The final challenge was not to let our existing subscribers get lost in the shuffle. We needed to continue to deliver to them and provide them the same type of service to which they are accustomed.

Serving the Customer

The most important thing throughout all these changes and hurdles was to remember that we are here to serve the customer. The principle method to serve them was to have clear, consistent, and upfront messaging. Through the adjustments and problems, we needed to be consistent with how we communicated to our customers and provide them the service they desired. The hardest part of this was to in real-time, through the spike, know what was going on with each order to be able to deliver on that clear, consistent, and upfront messaging. If there was a problem or the order was delayed, we needed to own up to the error and clear message that to the client. In doing this we got extremely positive responses from our customers. The upfront message was met with empathy and helped to create brand loyalty with our customers.

Although the COVID-19 outbreak has delivered unanticipated problems to many aspects of Rastelli’s business, we are using our creative thinking and industry knowledge to deliver proactive, adaptive solutions. Through our dynamic marketing efforts, we can fulfill the all-time high demand for food delivery services. However, the main thing we want to do is to serve the customer by delivering them a vital service and top-notch customer service. If you weren’t able to attend our webinar, no worries! We plan on having many more in the future. DMi hopes you are staying happy and healthy during these turbulent times.