Smoke Inn is an online smoke shop that sells everything from budget-friendly cigars to premium boutiques and topshelf classics, as well as humidors and cigar accessories. It also offers a Cigar of the Month Club, as well as a more elite, limited-space Connoisseur Club, which features unique smoking experiences delivered to customers’ doors straight from respected manufacturers. The company is known for its Microblend Series, which features exclusive, small-batch cigars from leading manufacturers such as Padron, Arturo Fuente, My Father, and Tatuaje.
Smoke Inn brought Cigarketing onboard to help plan and launch multiple campaigns, as well as assemble a plan for ongoing digital marketing tactics during the off-event season.
Cigarketing first led campaigns to help promote and sell tickets to Smoke Inn’s big annual event, The Great Smoke. The in-person event typically features cigar specials, alcohol tastings, live music, food and a chance to mingle with fellow cigar enthusiasts and hear from some major names in the cigar industry. The Great Smoke events Cigarketing helped promote occurred during 2020 and 2021, so the previously in-person events were moved to fully digital, creating a unique challenge.
In addition to event marketing, Cigarketing also worked on Smoke Inn’s website, email marketing, and social media.
Cigarketing redesigned the entire backend of Smoke Inn’s website and streamlined the user experience for customers logging into their account, making it easier for them to find the clubs they were signed up for. Cigarketing also dove deep into optimizing the brand’s website for search engines through extensive onpage optimization and ongoing blog content creation.
Prior to their partnership with Cigarketing, Smoke Inn’s posting on social media was inconsistent and failed to take advantage of certain platform’s ecommerce abilities. To improve the brand’s social presence, Cigarketing revamped Smoke Inn’s social media profiles and created a calendar for regular posting.
Finally, Cigarketing also launched a new email marketing series for Smoke Inn to highlight the blog Smoke Inn recently launched and increase engagement with Smoke Inn’s Socialite group on Facebook.
Although the first Great Smoke that Cigarketing helped Smoke Inn promote fell during the first year of the pandemic in 2020 and had to be moved to a fully digital format, the event still sold out – as did the Great Smoke that Cigarketing helped promote in 2021.
Through its SEO efforts, which included onpage optimization and creating a new blog with fresh weekly content, Cigarketing was able to increase Smoke Inn’s organic traffic 10% in the first year of their partnership. More importantly, the traffic increases led to an increase in revenue to the tune of more than $1 million from organic traffic.
The email marketing series also broke records for open rates, clicks and sales for Smoke Inn. Cigarketing’s email efforts generated almost $100,000 in sales over a three-month period.
By revamping their social media profiles and bringing consistency to posting content, Cigarketing was also able to increase Smoke Inn’s audience by 20% in the first few months of work, as well as turn their Instagram account into a new sales channel they had not effectively utilized before.
The Cigarketing team understands the daily challenges business owners face and is ready to show that they don’t have to do it alone.