The Power of Digital PR: Phelps United’s Success Story

During the peak of the 2022 holiday shopping season, inflation hit a 40-year high and many retailers expressed concern about rising costs and narrowing margins – ultimately forcing some to make changes to their return policies, such as reducing return windows as well as adding shipping and restocking fees.

Phelps United, a premier eCommerce brand accelerator, was interested in capturing the attention of Amazon sellers and sought to uncover if imposing stricter return policies may result in long-term brand damage for merchants. Knowing that holiday shopping was in full swing, Phelps United needed to act quickly. 

To drive awareness around consumer spending and holiday trends, Idea Grove and Phelps United developed a survey and report with fresh consumer data – using this to drive brand mentions and backlinks to PhelpsUnited.com.

Idea Grove used the third-party survey platform Pollfish to prescreen 600 U.S. adults, asking about their expectations for eCommerce gifts and returns during the upcoming holiday season. The report was then published on Phelps United’s website and Idea Grove distributed a press release on Business Wire. Idea Grove also launched a media relations campaign that targeted both national and trade media outlets as well as podcast and broadcast opportunities. The campaign featured several phases of pitching that latched onto relevant holiday retail stories in the news cycle, along with delving deeper into specific products and respondents’ demographics.

Through this initiative, Phelps United achieved tangible results and established itself as a dominant player in the industry. 

Key results include: 

• 13 total placements across top industry trade outlets and online blogs, along with 6 social media mentions from news outlets

• 22.5M total audience size
• Cited by publications such as Footwear News, Chain Store Age, Sourcing Journal, and Yahoo!, to name a few 

• 20 inbound links to Phelps’ survey blog post

• 5 links were from sites with a domain rating of 50 or higher, including high-value links from Footwear News (DR 80)and Yahoo! (DR 76)

• 3,424 total views to the BusinessWire.com posting, driving 120 link clicks and 35 syndicated articles

• Total of 247 visits to the survey report on Phelps United’s website since January 2023, with 35% arriving from organic search, 31% from referral traffic, and 25% from direct traffic 

Throughout the course of the campaign, Phelps’ survey post was the 4th highest-performing Phelps page in search. Phelps’ survey blog post and related coverage also steadily climbed Google search results throughout December 2022. 

More importantly, the biggest factor in a brand’s domain rating is high-quality inbound links. Phelps United’s domain rating skyrocketed over the course of this campaign – reaching its highest historical score of 20 in January 2023.