Metal Mulisha Revs Up Online Traffic

Apparel licensing company La Jolla Group manages a portfolio of brands including O'Neill, Metal Mulisha, Rusty, and FMF Racing, all catering to the diehard surf and action sports set.

Metal Mulisha, a brand influenced strongly by the world of motocross, has customers that are too hype-oriented and tech-savvy for us not to be agile," according to Daniel Zahn Neukomm, La Jolla's executive vice president of strategy.

With more than 1.3 million fans on Facebook, the brand has to remain on the cutting edge to increase engagement across channels and online sales.

But as progressive a label as Metal Mulisha is, justifying spend on social initiatives is always a question of measurable return—and the brand's early investments did not reap the outcomes it was seeking. When La Jolla Group found ReadyPulse, a software company that helps online businesses drive revenue through personalized, interactive testimonials and content placed on shopping pages to increase engagement, this summer, it seemed a near perfect fit.

"We've done everything from sweepstakes to Facebook-targeted marketing," Neukomm says. "We were hearing, 'Social agencies were going to increase engagement,' but we really didn't know what that meant. [ReadyPulse] had a strong API, and we knew…what we needed to address—page views, bounce rates, time on page, highly quantitative metrics."

Metal Mulisha sponsors several motocross riders, producing related content like high-definition videos and blogs to hook customers. The brand's Twitter page, with about 70,000 followers, is a social venue for bikers to trade everything from action photos to advice on riding gear and attire. The next step was translating "likes" and followers to business on Metal Mulisha's commerce site.

"We knew that if a consumer could see a relevant product with a relevant comment…it would create an additional emotional reaction or layer of attachment to what they were viewing," Neukomm explains.

When Metal Mulisha dynamically embedded ReadyPulse's product testimonial widgets on its e-commerce site, tapping into social comments from the brand's most prolific customers, it noticed a near-immediate return on its investment. Deployed first across its sponsored motocross rider pages, and progressing to shoppable apparel pages, the brand saw a 120 percent increase in page conversions with a 113 percent increase in page traffic. Time spent on pages increased 91 percent per visit, and there was up to a 57 percent increase in per-visit dollar value, or total revenue divided by the number of site visits.

Using ReadyPulse, Metal Mulisha has gained a deeper understanding of its most active customers by drawing on metrics that measure what content and keywords are having the most impact on the brand, and which customers ignite the most social engagement.

Although La Jolla Group used ReadyPulse first for Metal Mulisha because that's where the company had the largest repository of social commentary for indexing, the company is "certainly going to deploy it across more brands," Neukomm says.

As Neukomm sums it up: "To put the right content in front of the right consumer at the right time next to a product they're considering buying is just a no-brainer."

The Payoff

Using ReadyPulse, La Jolla Group's Metal Mulisha brand saw:

• up to a 57 percent increase in per-visit dollar value;
• a 120 percent rise in page conversions;
• a 113 percent increase in page traffic; and
• 91 percent more time spent on pages.

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