Dean Tassy looooves chocolate. It’s in his blood…literally: his family business bears the name of his own great-grandmother, known herself in her native Greece for her fine confections.

As the third-generation owner of Aléthea’s Chocolates, Dean had an amazing product that immediately won the praise of whomever tried it, as the finest chocolate they’d ever tasted. Unfortunately, as a the proprietor of a single storefront on the extreme suburban fringe of a small Upstate New York market, only the fortunate few who had known about Aléthea’s Chocolates from their time in Buffalo, New York were his regular customers – and there were fewer and fewer of them with each passing year.

Aléthea’s did have a website when they were first introduced to Rare Earth’s Marketing Services in October, 2006. Unfortunately, the site was barely making money. In fact, it took the site almost all of the 34 months it had been online, to earn back the original investment.

We promised to change that.

We started by opening up the content of Aléthea’s existing website site to make it more easily locatable by Search Engines and created a Holiday ad campaign usingGoogle AdWords. We installed Google Analytics at that time, so that we could begin collecting traffic and performance data. We also suggested a range of other options. But after 3 years of lackluster performance, Dean needed to see proof that we could make his website earn a positive return.

The results we achieved with these simple steps earned us enough credibility to follow-up with a Valentine’s Day campaign that included a Broadcast email blast in addition to another AdWords campaign.

Following the success of the prior two campaigns, we were able to persuade Aléthea’s that they needed to do both a complete redesign of the site to better frame their excellent products and also engage us to create custom application to make chocolate buying online almost as much fun as eating it.

The Custom Chocolate Box™ as it came to be trademarked, would allow site visitors to create a completely customized box of 40 individual pieces of chocolate from Aléthea’s selection of more than one hundred gourmet, premium-quality, hand-crafted truffles, creams, dipped nuts, fruits, jellies, crunches and caramels. To this, we simply said “yum!”

At the time, no other online chocolatier had such a shopping option that allowed the kind of flexibility and ease of use we recommended … not even the big boys that claimed to have better chocolate and commanded far bigger marketing budgets. In fact, most online chocolatiers who had any customization option at all, allowed paltry choices of four items or less for a one-pound box.

The AdWords campaign that we created to support the launch of this new personal shopping assistant featured the tagline: ”All ‘ooooh,’ zero ‘eeuw’”(sm) solution to Holiday shopping.

Even with the modest steps we took at the start of our engagement in 2006, Aletheas.com site sales jumped by 36% over the 2005 Holiday season and surpassed the combined sales of the previous 6 months.

The follow-up Valentine’s Day campaign resulted in sales that more than tripled his online revenues from the previous February, led in large part by a 9.8% purchase rate from recipients of the email blast.

(Now, here’s where things get really exciting)

Even in a year when consumers cut back on luxury items, the launch of the Aletheas.com redesign and Custom Chocolate Box™ on 21-November-2007, could have scarcely yielded better results:

• Search results:
  • In only 7 days following launch, the site had jumped in the Google search returns for “chocolates” from the 38th position to the 16th position.
  • By Day 25, it had climbed to the first page, ranking #10 out of 26.6M returns.
  • By Day 30, the site climbed to the 5th position, trailing only See’s Candies, Ghirardelli, Godiva, Wikipedia and directory site Chocolate.com;

• Revenue:
  • By Day 15, website sales exceeded the sales of the entire 40-day 2006 Holiday season by 14%;
  • Single-day sales for 30-November exceeded the total sales of 7 out of the previous 12 months. This pattern repeated on 6-December-2007 and 13-December;
  • By the end of the 23rd day, cumulative website site sales exceeded the combined sales of the previous 10 months. Also, the number of orders for December, 2007 surpassed all of December, 2006;
  • By the end of the 2007 Holiday season:
    • Total site revenue for the season more than tripled 2006 revenues;
    • The new site had earned more revenue than:
      • the previous 323 days of 2007, by 34%
      • all of 2006, by 25%
      • all of 2005, by 41%
      • all previous Holiday seasons combined (2003 – 2006), by 32%
    • The average order amount increased by 36% per order above the 2006 Holiday season average;
    • 78% of all orders were from first-time customers;
    • The AdWords campaign yielded over $2.00 in website revenue for every $1 spent on the campaign;
    • The Custom Chocolate Box™ was the second most popular item (behind Sponge Candy), accounting for 21% of site revenue. It was also the overall top-earning product.
    • Aletheas.com earned a 66% net return on its marketing investment in under 40 days.

While these are uncommonly good results for a new initiative, this case effectively demonstrates that time and resources invested in a great design, combined with the application of a smart, market-aware approach to an eBusiness solution, equals more revenue for the site owner – and a positive return on the overall investment.