Our Business in Lockdown - What’s the impact?

We’ve been in lockdown for over 100 days and, although some businesses are starting to open back up as restrictions ease, it’s likely to be some time until we can understand the true economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Back when lockdown was announced in March, we faced the same degree of uncertainty as so many of our clients. One of our key strengths is in our flexible approach to managing client relationships. We don’t think it’s right to tie clients into long-term contracts or make it difficult to pause or cancel activity, so when those first few phone calls came through requesting that all activity be stopped immediately, of course we had to oblige.

In the first days and weeks of lockdown, we lost probably 20% of our smaller clients - those in the hospitality sector who relied so heavily on driving customers to their premises that it was just impossible to continue advertising with the premises closed. Although some have now returned and we’re helping them adjust to the ‘new normal’, it’s likely we’ll see others forced to close their doors permanently which is hugely upsetting for everyone involved.

Perhaps something we did not expect was the impact that lockdown would have on our retail clients. With customers spending more time than ever at home, some clients started to experience a gradual (and organic) increase in website traffic and sales. We started to realise that despite the panic and uncertainty, lockdown had in fact created an opportunity for online retailers and it was our job to help our clients respond to this; adapting strategies, changing budgets, re-working content and even re-building one client’s ecommerce website from scratch.

One client saw their monthly webshop revenue increase by over 500% MoM and joined another three clients in reporting that April 2020 was responsible for their highest revenue of all time. Despite the uncertainty that lockdown brought, it was comforting to know that there were some success stories to be part of and that the financial impact for our clients might not be quite as devastating as we first expected.

In fact, when one of our restaurant clients re-opened in June offering a takeaway-only service, we saw a phenomenal 30,000 visits to their website throughout the month (10,000 visits per month is considered a good month for this particular client outside of lockdown).

But there hasn’t been much time to celebrate. Something that this sudden influx of new (and existing) customers has made us question is how our clients deal with customers after that initial purchase. How effective is our eCRM offering? How do we drive repeat purchase through our paid digital channels? When do we start to introduce subscription models and incentivise referrals and loyalty?

When all of this is over, how can we emulate the same success that we saw during lockdown? This is going to be our main focus for the remainder of 2020. Our success over these last few months has forced us to re-evaluate a lot of what we thought we knew about our clients’ customer journey. We’re taking things back to basics and doing a lot of work on user journey mapping - an exercise our clients are loving at the moment - and it’s bringing up some really interesting discussions and actions to be implemented.

All in all, the direct impact that the pandemic had on our business was minimal. We did not have to use the furlough scheme nor did we have to request any business grants or loans. In fact, it’s fair to say that we have seen our busiest ever period during these last 100 days. Over lockdown we on-boarded four new large clients and increased our monthly retained hours across two of our existing clients, and we’re emerging from this difficult last few months with a new focus and determination to help our clients continue to succeed.