2022 Year In Review

“The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.”- Michael Altshuler

This year was about delivering success to our clients in many forms, and making sure we are measuring what we deliver. Our clients came out of 2020 and 2021 with a strong wind in their online sails, and our biggest goal was to push this success forward so they can experience continued growth even as the wind calms. 2022 was about focusing on fortifying our tools, optimizing our processes and staffing up to better support our clients.

This year we were heavily invested in improving our average in all areas. Receiving Customer Success surveys on every service ticket has given us daily feedback on what's working and what needs improvement. This resulted in our satisfaction rating rising to nearly 100%, where it has stayed since October. Our clients' customer experience and visitor engagement has improved significantly on every website that was redesigned through our E-Commerce Growth Program. As a result of our efforts, the average e-commerce transaction has increased nearly $180 per order since the beginning of the year.

Punchmark's mantra from the beginning has been simply, "improve every day", and after hiring exciting new talent, more measuring, and a more narrowed focus, we've done that better in 2022 than ever before. Here are some of our proudest achievements from this year!

 

Punchmark Client Workshop

In May, Punchmark hosted the inaugural Client Workshop in Charlotte, North Carolina to raging success! It was so great getting the chance to see so many of our friends in one place, who all had the goal of being educated on how to make the most of their website, with a major focus on selling online.

We put this workshop together to reinvest in our clients and their collective successes, because the better our retailers do, the better we are at being a website partner. This two-day workshop was attended by retailers who wanted a hands-on approach to learning all about the ins and outs of SiteManager, how to set up products for e-commerce, taking great photos & videos, generating website & foot traffic, digital marketing advice, e-commerce tactics, point of sale integration and a lot more.

We were so proud of how this event went, that we have already started planning the next one for 2023, so keep your eyes peeled!

 

Platform Upgrades

Our core platform has seen the most focus this year with several large releases that we felt really moved the needle as well as a few internal upgrades that, while unseen to the end user, has allowed us to build better and faster.

Form Builder

The keystone product release for 2022, this tool expands SiteManager’s capabilities to include building forms and dropping them onto pages they build using PageBuilder. If you missed this announcement, read the blog article or watch the video to learn how to build forms today!

 

Search Analytics

An underrated feature that was released this year is website search analytics on your SiteManager dashboard that displays what terms have been searched on your website. This is for when a user types in your search field in your header or navigation bar, and can be filtered by date range.

SiteManager Billing

It’s important to us that you understand what you are paying for which is why we tied the Billing & Account section directly into your SiteManager. You can find it in Settings > Billing & Account Settings.

Drop-a-Hint Functionality

We built a custom module for a few clients that adds a Drop-a-Hint button to product detail pages. This allows customers to share products with their loved ones more directly than a wishlist. The implementation has led to success, and two clients even built marketing campaigns around driving customers to "drop a hint". We will be making these modules widely available to all clients in the near future.

Integration with LogicMate POS

We've been working closely with LogicMate over the past few months to integrate products, categories, brands, images, and transactions from their Point of Sale product into Punchmark websites. As we've gotten better with platform integrations, this has become a product we are proud of and adds a lot of value for mutual clients we have with LogicMate.  

Overhaul of shipping calculation code

We have completely re-written the code that calculates shipping methods, times, minimum costs, and communication to customers about these attributes. As the features regarding shipping methods have grown, this overhaul became necessary to rule out inaccuracies and ensure the code is maintainable without the risk of adding bugs.

Internal Image Library

We successfully created the first building block of what will become the renovated Image Library for retailers to use. The current Image Library is content driven, however this new Library will be user driven, with a robust tagging system that will allow for filtering by image dimensions and topic. The first step is adding these images internally, which we are already underway with, the next is allowing the images to be used by retailers, and then eventually allowing retailers and vendors to upload their own images to be used by others. Stay tuned as this feature evolves toward a public release.

SiteManager CSV Product Importer Upgrades

The CSV Importer in SiteManager has undergone a lot of improvements. These include the ability to add up to 17 arbitrary product details, an "excludeFromCoupons" field, as well as fields for integration with Picup Media's Virtual Try-On and draggable 3D renderings.

 

Vendors

We looked at the services we provide, and one that has high potential to bring even more value to our clients is our integration with vendor product images, product data, and marketing. We know that everyone struggles with this, and Punchmark has decided we want to be the best. From hiring a Senior-level employee to head up the program to conducting intensive integrations with specific vendors one by one, we have advanced by leaps and bounds in this department. Here are some of the ways this was done

Vendor Portal

Alongside the previously mentioned Form Builder release, the Vendor Portal was our major product release for 2022. This tool has allowed us to provide a deeper level of care and insight to the Vendors we work closest with, and is the first step on our way to elevating the Retailer/Vendor relationship to never before seen heights. Our goals in the next few quarters will be to add advanced analytics to the portal, so that vendors can assess how well their products are performing. We couldn't think of a better way to get vendors to understand the value of investing in your digital representation of them. If you missed the blog post about the Portal release, read it here.  

Fully-Rebuilt Premium Vendor Data System

The infrastructure for importing products is the keystone of the entire Premium Vendor program, and something that was long overdue for an improvement. In updating this infrastructure we are now able to add and update vendors much quicker than before.

Separated LabGrown Markups

For any clients that take lab-grown diamond sales seriously, we realized it was imperative that they mark these diamonds up differently than natural diamonds. Modeled after Stuller's natural and lab-grown markup interface, we created an easy-to-use interface that allows clients to adjust markups for their lab-grown diamonds separately – on the same page as natural diamond markups.

Achieving Our Highest-Ever level of Data Recency

Punchmark is proud to announce that as of November 15th, we have achieved our highest number of premium vendors with fully up-to-date product data and images. The systems we have arduously put in place are working, and we're only just beginning.

 

Performance

Loading speed and the performance of our websites are an arms race that must be constantly updated and upgraded to keep pace. Here are the improvements we have made in the background to ensure your websites are loading faster than ever.

CSS Engine Rebuild

The styling engine behind your website has been reorganized into a library of components and rewritten using a preprocessor scripting language called Sass. This upgrade is not only a massive performance boost, but it also opens up future releases of the platform to having more built-in style options and the ability for us to systematically produce a single, perfectly efficient, minified CSS file with all your local customizations merged in seamlessly.

Rebuilt Grid Query Engine for Speed Increases

We completely rebuilt the way our Product Grids and Details pages request data. Optimizations created over 10x speed increase across all grid pages, which really makes a difference for a shopper!

Next-Gen Server Infrastructure

We created Next Generation Server Infrastructure for faster websites. By the end of the first quarter of 2023, all clients will be migrated to this new infrastructure automatically, giving everyone the benefit of this faster, more-efficient technology.

Marketing

The Digital Marketing department has continued to grow at Punchmark, and we are excited to announce that Punchmark is now a Google Partner, a special status awarded to those partners and agencies that offer the highest level of Google Ads service, performance, and management to clients.

We’re continually aligning our marketing services with the campaigns and channels that jewelry store owners have seen the most success with. From Google Shopping and Social Product Carousels, to YouTube Advertising and Local SEO, our marketing and content teams have been focused on growing our clients through the most effective means possible within their marketing budgets, even when platforms and customer spending habits are unpredictable.

The results have been remarkable!

• One of our favorite clients, a Midwest jewelry store in a small town has broken the small town mold, and expanded their client base significantly through local Google Search Ads, earning customers and business from competition both locally and miles away.
• Six years is a long time to go without updating your website. One of our smaller jewelry stores in a suburb of a major Midwestern city is now ranking in the top 10 locally in Google for the most sought after jewelry services and custom jewelry terms after doing a Local SEO Update project.
• Sometimes you need to beat the competition. A client of ours in the Southwest saw their traffic grow 31% and online revenue increase 36% after reevaluating their local marketing strategy and choosing to double down on Social Advertising and Google Search Ads.
• Customers are shopping for jewelry online. A Southeast based jewelry store chain that invests several thousand a month into digital marketing is on track to grow to over $125,000 this year in ecommerce, and have seen their in-store sales increase 30-40% each year since launching their website.
• Target your local region before expanding. Black Friday ecommerce sales grew 185% after one of our larger clients reined in national advertising spend to focus on their local territory.

A big initiative this year has been working with every Ecommerce Growth Program client on their marketing analysis and strategy, helping guide the strategic direction, user experience, and search engine functionality for every redesign project. We are also gearing up for the June 2023 migration from the old Google Analytics Universal to the new Google Analytics 4, and reviewing and revising our marketing technology integrations along the way.

2023 will continue our client’s growth trajectory, with expansion into Over-The-Top video advertising, Geo-Fencing, SMS and text marketing, and more coming in the new year.

 

Design

This year we had the pleasure of working with two design interns this year, Tuuli Pirinen & Savannah Kell. They both contributed excellent design work to the team and helped test run our new Content Team plan. This new team will support the design, marketing & project management teams with copywriting, image selection, quality assurance, transferring pages, and more! We are very excited to build and grow this team.

 

Punchmark Community Facebook Group

The Punchmark Community has hit 350 members! This tool continues to be one of our preferred methods of communication with Punchmark clients as a whole. We learned that emails easily get ignored or deleted, but the success rate on communication through a Facebook post in our group. If you haven’t joined yet, and are an active client, please do! 

 

In the Loupe

Our weekly podcast produced with our friends The Smithee Group, In the Loupe, continues to grow in scope as we find a unique listenership and community on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This year we focused more on interviews with interesting personalities and specialists in and around the jewelry industry. We had the privilege of speaking with movers & shakers in the industry like the RJO Board, visionaries such Picup Media & Clientbook, and even some of our long term clients like Howie at Robert Irwin Jewelers!

We hit a big milestone of 10,000 downloads, but even crazier, we are already cresting 15,000, and have no plans of slowing down next year! Stay tuned for Season 4, debuting in January 2023, with big plans for interviews at RJO San Antonio in January!

This season, thank you to Deeb from Graziella Fine Jewellery, Ryan from Clientbook, Sebas & Cole from INOX, Amy at The Hills Jewelry, 3 RJO Board Members, Howie from Robert Irwin Jewelers, Faye from ClearSale, Amanda from Nelson's Jewelry, Scott from Stambaugh Jewelers, Megan from Crabtree Consulting, Kevin from Picup Media, Jennifer Markas from Women’s Jewelry Association, Alex Schlindwein from Diamond Diaries, Malyia from Made by Malyia, Sherry & Stephen Barnes at Edge Retail Academy, Tanya Nisguretsky at Virtual Diamond Boutique, Zulu at Smiling Rocks, Craig MacBean at Ostbye, Vincent from Arezzo Jewelers, Larry Johnson, and all of the clients interviewed at the Client Workshop in Charlotte.

Staffing

As we increase the number of services we offer our clients, we inevitably grow in size. It’s always fun seeing more faces in the office and online, and this year has seen the most growth in one year… ever! Here are the new employees we have added to Punchmark in 2022.

New hires