For more than eight decades, Mack’s Prairie Wings has been the world’s premier waterfowl outfitter. The family run business grew impressively from a small section of apparel in McCollum’s Hardware Store into a regional powerhouse retailer, and a prime acquisition target.
The Opportunity: Serve Customers Online
While Mack’s boasted exceptional quality, a sterling reputation, and a vibrant legacy in the brick-and-mortar space, the company lacked a robust digital presence. Mack’s partnered with Tadpull to rebuild its ecommerce site. They knew that in order to compete in the marketplace they would need a solid foundation with the capabilities of collecting key data points so they could deliver personalized experiences to their loyal customer base.
The Strategy:
Build a Solid Foundation
In 2017 Mack’s brought-on Tadpull as an extension of its team to rebuild its website to be centered around an ecommerce experience, which meant strategically implementing NetSuite as a sophisticated enterprise resource planning system on the backend. In order to create a solid foundation for collecting and activating data, the Tadpull team:
- Fixed prior site errors: Without built-in logic on the inherited site, the Tadpull team manually re-directed hundreds of thousands of URLS so that the business would have a proper foundation from which to work.
- Built a custom web-app to rename images in proper syntax: The custom web-app made possible a herculean effort of cataloging a huge number of retailer-provided images within NetSuite. The app defined where the image should live in NetSuite and properly named them so that parent and associated child SKUs were logged in the ERP.
- Fixed technical SEO terms: The Tadpull team made backend SEO adjustments so that Mack’s would trend higher in Google search. The team also used keyword data to drive content creation that drew in the right customer.
In the months following the relaunch, Mack’s saw dramatic improvements in site traffic. That traffic continued to grow month over month, an average of 20% for 15 consecutive months.
Personalize and Optimize
Once traffic to the site was consistent and growing, the Tadpull team focused on conversion-rate optimizations. They made granular changes to help improve the site experience for customers such as making the navigation more user-friendly. They also implemented logic on the backend that made customers aware of how much quantity remained for a product, nudging customers to purchase if an item had low stock.
A Team Approach
As the partnership grew and deepened, Tadpull took on more responsibility, affording Mack’s the ability to keep their internal team compact.
Tadpull was responsible for setting the technology roadmap and the overall ecommerce strategy, as well as managing daily omni-channel campaigns and operations against Paid, SMS, Email, CRO, SEO, Referral, and more.
The Success Story
In 2017 Mack’s recognized they needed to bring a partner onboard to help grow their ecommerce business. In four short years, after Partnering with Tadpull over a 6 year period, they were able to:
- Expand their ecommerce presence to reprepsent more than 50% of their revenue (up from around 25%).
- Effectively compete with retailers such as Cabellas and BassPro but with just a fraction of the in-house human resources.
- Gain 60% of their website traffic from SEO, which helped to reduce their reliance and investments to drive traffic from paid platforms.
By using the Pond software, Tadpull was able to gather and parse zero- and first-party data so that Mack’s could better understand its audience base and make profitable decisions.
Ultimately, in May 2024, Mack’s Prairie Wings was acquired by Bass Pro Shop.
- Bolstered owned channels: Built and scaled a profitable email and SMS program on Klaviyo, with multiple years enjoying 100%+ growth in SMS.
- Segmented audiences: The Tadpull team focused heavily on segmenting customers into highly focused groups and served those customer clusters specific, automated messages through email and texts.
- Grew Revenue: Because of Tadpull’s help in creating a personalized ecommerce experience for loyal Mack’s customers, the company saw revenue grow 76% between 2017 and 2021.