There are many, many suppliers of posters and decorative murals. To be successful in this “Red Ocean” despite all the competition, you need a clear focus. One person who implements this particularly well with his company is René Ruhland. Together with his wife Anna and his brother Marc, he has built up the myposter Group, which this year will be scratching the 100-million-euro sales mark. The new episode of Zippers Insights is all about myposter’s recipe for success, conversion rates, the customer journey, Google and the family business.
Originally, it wasn’t about self-printing at all, as René Ruhland and his brother Marc had actually concentrated on importing and selling artwork. But keeping the right motifs in the right quantities was difficult in the long run – and the path to their own production in run size 1 was only logical at some point. In 2010, both bought their first small digital printing machine, programmed the first software, the first configurator. In 2011, they founded myposter.
Although the company, which today also includes brands such as Kartenliebe, ArtPhotoLimited and Junique, always sells a printed product in the end, the orientation of the myposter Group is somewhat different: “At the core, we are an online business, a digital company. At our core, we write software,” explains founder and CEO René Ruhland. “But in our field, you also have to be able to print.” And today, myposter actually does that with two fully equipped production sites in Germany, because high-quality products are a must.
Focus on conversion
But the lion’s share of myposter’s success has been and still is (or even more so than before) its consistent digital focus. “From the very beginning, we have always focused solely on our digital product. We are totally conversion-driven, we write the configurators ourselves for the whole keyboard, meaning from photo books to calendars or photo prints. We’ve always made sure that we create excellent user journeys, because we’re in a search-driven market. That means we have to convert. And I think we’re really good at this ‘conversion game’,” says René Ruhland. Of course, this also applies to the mobile sector.
In the latest episode of Zipper’s Insights, René Ruhland reveals what a good conversion rate is for myposter, what it takes to be permanently found with its offers in this “Red Ocean”, what role marketing, Google and social media play in this and why he assumes that competition in the online world will actually become less in the future. It’s worth a listen.
As always, you can listen to the podcast here at beyond-print.de under ZIPPERS INSIGHTS – or alternatively on Spotify.
