Where to begin with a year like 2020... We accomplished so much these past 56 months! All jokes aside, much of what was created was out of absolute necessity, as opposed to what we were planning to accomplish. Even after expanding the team with 4 new employees, we were seriously put to the test regarding the amount of requests and tickets. At the same time, our entire office was shifted to working remotely and had to figure out how to communicate as efficiently and effectively as we did while all in one room. The impact on retail stores forced a heavy shift to e-commerce and forced everyone to take their web presence more seriously, which is something we have been beating the drum on for years, but when Covid-19 hit, the window to act blew wide open for every single jewelry business.
We couldn't be more proud of our all-star team! Over the last year, our team has worked the hardest it ever has, because that is what we needed to do to help our clients survive this terrible situation. We stepped up the outreach and education immensely with new Podcasts and even a Digital Conference.
As a result of the increase in customer activity, we introduced new processes and organization systems that helped automate some of the communication surrounding the status of requests. This adjustment allows our team to work more efficiently and organize tasks while also automatically notifying clients as the work gets done. Ticket closing speed is now 300% faster since adopting this new system.
In general, our clients doubled down on their online efforts and many of them crushed every metric imaginable. In fact it's strange to say it, but Punchmark has recorded record numbers this year on nearly all the metrics we're following. We now have more live Punchmark client websites than ever, more of those stores selling online, and nearly all of them making online sales—something that we are more ecstatic about than you can imagine.
Number of active Punchmark client websites:
178
Themes Live on V6
19
Customs Live on V6
147
Premiums Live on V6
Let's take a look at 2020 by the numbers.
By the Numbers (Client E-Commerce)
An exciting set of statistics to look at is how the majority of our clients performed this year. We are always trying to raise the ceiling in order volume, sales quantity, and the average number of clients who are actually converting on sales. We want “average” jewelry stores to be crushing it online, not just the bigger stores that already are doing well in their brick & mortar stores.
578.7%
Increase in customer sales
510.4%
Increase in customer orders
$312.54
▲14.9%
Average Transaction Amount
14.9
Average # of orders per client
81.7%
increase in sites that made 1 sale
As a whole, shopping has shifted online this year at a far greater rate than ever, with some estimations indicating 10 years worth of online shopping penetration growth in just March & April. That trend has continued through Black Friday week and (hopefully) through the holidays. Some of our clients are seeing record sales for their businesses this year, with a far greater percentage attributed to online shopping than ever before.
379
Orders over $1,000
42.4%
Increase in Customer Sales
over last Black Friday
Number of Active clients With online financing & fraud protection partners:
13
Affirm
29
Sezzle
42
ClearSale
Highest Performing Client Stats:
1001
Total Sales
$356.96
Average Sale
$281,289.55
Total USD
Here are last years numbers to compare: 2019 Numbers
By the Numbers (Punchmark Internal)
At Punchmark we have been… busy. We understood that we would be losing our annual/semi-annual check-ins with our clients at the jewelry shows we attend. These face-to-face meetings provided a way for us to preach about the important aspects of your website, offer new suggestions, and provide updates on upcoming developments.
We decided to double down on our digital communication, so that we could fill the gap left by Trade Shows, as well as to further add even more benefit to being a Punchmark Client.
20
Podcast Episodes Published
2000+
Podcast Downloads
40
▲16
Livestreams Hosted
773
▲270
Platform Patches
5
▼5
Jewelry Shows Attended
New & Improved Digital communications
Livestreams
After the success of Season 1 of Livestreams, we continued on with Season 2, and added individual series, co-hosting, and a much more regimented approach. It was a whole team effort, covering Edge Tutorials, SiteManager walkthroughs, creative tools, and Digital Marketing lessons.
At one point (February - June) we went 5 months straight without taking a week off publishing an educational video. We could not be prouder of the content we produced, and knowing that our clients are the most informed and educated jewelers out there. THANK YOU for continuing to attend, ask questions, and learn. We can’t wait to show you what we have in store for Season 3!
The Facebook Community
We learned that a lot of our clients spend much of their time on Facebook. Our employees at Punchmark spend a lot of their time on Reddit, a space for micro-communities. We decided to merge the two and create our own little Subreddit on Facebook as a space to announce developments, answer questions, post content, and interface with our clients directly.
This space has become wildly popular and has nearly replaced our email blasts, and with nearly 300 of our clients active in the Community on a near daily-basis, we don’t have to worry about getting lost in someone's inbox or spam.
We’ve also started to publish weekly micro-blogs. A few Punchmark team members have started writing short essays about topics they are experts on, which has been received exceptionally well. To date there are 3 micro-blogs that are posted in the community.
As of 12.29.2020
15
Dev Dives
8
Marketing Minutes
7
Design Tips
The added unforeseen benefit of this has been the interactions between our clients. It warms our hearts every time a jeweler answers another jeweler’s question, whether about best practices or how-tos. You all are what makes the space so amazing, and we feel lucky to have cultivated such an amazing group of jewelers.
Podcasts
At the start of the pandemic lockdown, many of our clients were unsure of what to do next now that their stores were closed. We decided to try to offer some guidance in the form of information and stories via The Jeweler’s Survival Kit podcast. After a 7 episode run, we wanted to move to a more evergreen, content focus, and morphed into "In the Loupe", a bi-weekly podcast about Ecommerce in the jewelry industry.
Combined, we published 20 episodes with over 2,000 downloads, and have had a whole lot of fun reaching our audience in new ways.
"In the Loupe" will be returning in early January, and we can’t wait for you to hear what we have ready!
Staffing
Punchmark was lucky to have the need to hire more team members in the midst of a pandemic. This year we hired 4 new members which brings our company to the largest it has ever been!
Kyle Bebeau
Front End Developer
Sean Moriarty
Back End Developer
Nicole Williams
Customer Success Associate
Gasper Gray
Customer Success Associate
Promotions
This year we also saw fit to elevate 2 employees to Director level positions, freeing the Partners to make higher level decisions, and to give more structure as our team adapted to being remote.
Jason Adams
Director of Education
Read Full Article
Michael Burpoe
Director of User Experience
Read Full Article
Uptick in service tickets
Related to the shift online, the number of users interacting with their sites on a day-to-day basis is the highest it ever has been. This means the occasions for discovering bugs or asking for help from the Customer Success team is far greater.
▲583.7%
Tickets Made This Year
▲437.5%
Tickets In November
As a result we have had to find a scalable solution for handling bugs, handling client phone calls, and rolling out new developments. This involves automation in our CRM, Hubspot, as well as better team management and tasking.
Back in the day when the entire company was composed of Ross, Dan, and Jason, Jason was able to handle every phone call and email himself --quickly. However, as our client list has continued to grow, our team has endeavored to keep pace. Alongside the new hires, we have also added new ticket automations that will allow us to spend more time solving problems and less time gathering information about them.
We appreciate everyone’s patience as we continue to refine our system, and are excited to continue to scale to meet our problems.
Platform Momentum
Last year we planned to release the following developments.
Q1
Edge EDT
Q1
Knowledge Base
Q1
Livestream Season 2
Q2
Navigation Editor
Q3
Form Editor
Q4
PageBuilder 2.0
Things had to adapt, as mid way through Q1 the pandemic got real and we switched to remote work. We prioritized tools that would help stores continue their business while their doors were closed for in-person sales. Read Last Year's Roadmap
Releases & Developments
EDGE EDT: Q2
A bi-directional integration with The EDGE Point of Sales system which allows your website and POS to sync customer data, their wish lists and sales in addition to just products & repairs.
PageBuilder 2.0: Q2
A comprehensive page building tool that allows for freeform section building end to end independent of page templates. Learn More https://youtu.be/I_yTZNKMa24
Creation of the UX Team: Q2
Led by Director of User Experience Michael Burpoe, this hybrid team takes client feature suggestions and works to implement them. They keep a lower number of active projects which ensures that they have a much higher rate of completion.
Monolith: Q3
The CSS Monolith is a style of compiling and minifying your website’s styling so that it loads extremely quickly. This allows for faster load times and higher ranking by Google.
Revolutionary Digital Marketing Program: Q3
We re-released our digital marketing program so that our clients’ approach can be more nimble and versatile in its execution instead of asking them to lock into a single approach long term. Learn More
Couch Conference Q1 + Q3
Along The Smithee Group, Clientbook and Convoi Events, we created a 100% digital conference for the jewelry industry. Our mission at The Couch Conference is to provide a positive digital atmosphere that gathers the most brilliant thinkers and doers, and focuses on equipping you to become a better leader, and growing your business. Learn More
Hard work on speed/process
Performance Optimization
With the increases in traffic and focus on websites this year, we rolled out several major performance updates to keep websites running smoothly.
CSS Monolith
We began consolidating all style sheets into one large file on page load, reducing the latency for loading style sheets by only having to download one file rather than multiple.
CSS and JS Minification
We implemented automatic minification of our CSS and JavaScript files, reducing the size of these files as much as possible to reduce download time.
Caching
we implemented HTML caching on all pages, and implemented caching for several of the more complicated parts of the platform such as grid pulls and navigation. This helps to reduce both latency and server load when opening a website.
WebP Support
Images are always the first step when optimizing a web page, and WebP images can be up to 50% smaller than JPEGs. We updated the platform to automatically convert every uploaded image to WebP and serve that format whenever possible.
Database Upgrades: two of our database servers were upgraded this year, allowing for faster processing of database queries.
Database Query Optimizations
Several parts of our platform, especially the checkout flow, were using complicated and un-optimized database queries. We put a focus on making these calls as fast as possible to reduce both the database load and the query time to improve users’ experiences.
What’s coming in 2021
We have a lot of very cool pieces of development and service coming in 2021. Much of the heavy lifting has been completed, and we are on to the refinement and improvement phase, which is the most fun for us! Some of the pieces we have slated for next year are:
Navigation Editor: Q1/Q2
This was deferred last year in lieu of speed improvements and platform upgrades. We are giving the ability to add the pages your create on your website to the navigation so that you don’t need to ask a CS team member to assist.
The Punchmark Knowledgebase
Rolling - A knowledgebase is essentially an instruction manual. Every major tech platform has one and answers 99% of all questions through it.
The Punchmark knowledgebase had a big shift in approach this year, from us building it in house to us using the Atlassian platform Confluence. This has sped things up enormously and we are planning on releasing knowledgebase pages for SiteManager on a tab by tab basis, starting with the Design tab and moving to Content, E-Commerce, and Commerce, with linking on individual SiteManager pages.
Read what has been added to the Knowledgebase beta so far here:
Livestream Season 3:
Returning January 13th - We are bringing back our enormously popular education series Livestreams for a 3rd season! They will take place every Wednesday at 2:00pm EST again, with a few new series, a few new hosts, but the same great quality content that you have grown to expect.
In the Loupe Season 2:
Returning January 14th - Our popular jewelry/ecommerce podcast series has racked up over 2,000 downloads and is returning for a 2nd season, featuring The Smithee Group. Although the shows will no longer be live recorded, there will be weekly uploads every Thursday around topics every business owner should understand.
Thank You
2020 has tested everybody in tech, in jewelry, and in each of our personal lives. We cannot say thank you enough, for your patience, your understanding, your willingness to learn and try new things, but please allow us to say it one more time this year.
Thank you,
Ross, Dan, Bryan, Jason, Michael, Thomas, Sarah, TRhodes, Katie, JoeK, Sean, Kyle, Yanni, Nicole, Gasper