Introducing Contrast, the eCommerce Company Behind Rising Star Nominee Elliott Davidson

Who are we?

We are Contrast: the eCommerce-only digital marketing agency based in Nottingham. Contrast was founded in 2018 by rising star nominee Elliott Davidson. After reaching a major crossroads in his career as a professional canoe slalom athlete, representing Ireland on an international level, Elliott decided to move careers and focus all his efforts on his business.

With the goal of creating the UK’s leading eCommerce marketing agency, Elliott created Contrast to have all the resources needed to successfully grow his own mini eCommerce empire, as well as helping clients grow their eCommerce businesses.

As retailers ourselves, we understand the operational and commercial side of running an eCommerce business and how to achieve scalable, sustainable, and profitable revenue.

Running our own eCommerce businesses (generating 7 figures annually) means we have been able to test different approaches and strategies on our own businesses.

What do we do?

Through our experience and testing on our own businesses, we have developed our proven growth framework which sets us apart from other marketing agencies. Where others focus solely on acquisition services, here at Contrast we focus on both acquisition and retention. 

But why bother with customers who have already bought from you? Existing customers are 9 times more likely to purchase from you again and acquiring a new customer is 5 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer. Retention just makes sense.

Our framework is made up of three sections that work together to get you the best and quickest ROI:

Demand capture – Generating sales by capturing the attention of people already searching for your product. First we use paid media (including paid shopping, paid search, paid retargeting) to get faster traction. We then use SEO methods to drive sales long term and ensure sustainable success targeting bottom and middle of the funnel terms.

Demand generation – Generating awareness and desire for your brand and products. We run different campaigns including Digital PR, influencer marketing, SEO (targeting top of the funnel terms) and paid social campaigns on the channels your customers use most. This ensures that you have strong visual content from our ad creative team that actually converts.

Customer retention – Generating repeat sales by targeting existing customers. We run email and SMS marketing campaigns, loyalty campaigns, and paid remarketing to get you back in front of your customers, taking advantage of those cheaper and more successful conversion rates of retention over acquisition.

But you don’t just want to know the theory behind our approach, you want to know if it gets results. Here are a couple of our recent successes:

Y Frame Discounts is one of our eCommerce businesses. We set a target to increase turnover by 50% in the first 6 months of 2022. To reach this target we increased efficiency at our warehouse and cleansed our OMS (Order Management System) to list more products on different sales channels. This resulted in us exceeding our target and hitting a turnover of 65%, all while maintaining a healthy net profit margin of 10%.

Another of our successes is with our client, EV Cables. By identifying underperforming aspects of their site and doing a theme replacement and customisation we improved their conversion rate by 44% from 1.37% to 1.97%. We also identified that since their site went through a botched replatforming, the main navigation click depth for two major categories had increased. So we changed the navigation structure which led to a 79.25% increase (from £7,780.68 to £13,946.83) in organic revenue in 30 days.

You can read more of our case studies here.

What does entering the award mean to us?

Entering the UK eCommerce Awards gives Elliott, and the whole team here at Contrast, the chance to gain industry recognition for the hard work that has (and continues) to go into everything we do.

The UK eCommerce Awards are well known within the marketing industry and carry a lot of weight amongst our peers and potential clients. Being nominated for the Rising Star Award is external validation that Elliott and the team know what they are doing and are respected within the industry.

Winning this award would be a big boost to Elliott’s career and would bring in more opportunities for Contrast to work with new clients on bigger projects, helping us in our strive to constantly develop ourselves and expand our horizons.