The Digital Fit: More Spanx — and Sales — with Every Year

Spanx by Sara Blakely, the popular maker of slenderizing undergarments and apparel, may be in the business of slimming, but its sales needed major expansion.

While positive media coverage and word of mouth grew Spanx through the mid-2000s, improving consumer-initiated demand from its e‐commerce website proved difficult. The site had limited search engine optimization (SEO) best practices in a market dominated by well-established smaller retailers immersed in SEO. As a result, Spanx was missing out on a valuable opportunity to grow its online sales.

Spanx sought guidance from Sherpa! Web Studios to aggressively improve search engine generated traffic and produce sustainable growth for their online initiative.

Sherpa! organized and launched a strategic search engine marketing campaign that included both (SEO) best practices and PR-event based pay-per-click.

The results, like Spanx, were pretty shapely!

• Search engine driven traffic surged 550%, increasing the firm’s online sales
• Search engine referrals increased by 438%, increasing Search’s share of total web site traffic six-fold
• Improved brand awareness by snatching top key‐phrase ranking for both branded and non‐branded products
• 65% of the tracked key‐phrase listings were in the top 10 results of major search engines
• Increased conversion rate of site visitors into actual customers by driving clearly defined, targeted traffic.

Ultimately, the cost of organic search engine driven traffic was reduced to less than 1 cent/visitor.

Sherpa’s successful digital initiatives to position Spanx at the top of its market garnered recognition from the Atlanta Interactive Marketing Association (AiMA), which awarded the agency with its 2008 award for Most Effective Search Engine Marketing.