Moving Milky Way Farm to greener pastures with enhanced ecommerce.

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Boosting sales of high-quality raw milk with WooCommerce.

Nestled in the rolling hills of western South Carolina, family-owned Milky Way Farm is a dairy farm and creamery that produces high-quality fresh and natural milk. Since 2003, the operation has bottled and sold Grade-A raw milk to farm markets, grocery stories and families in the region. With several years of successful sales, Milky Way Farm was ready to tackle the challenge of growing their ecommerce platform to bring them up to speed with a changing world.

With sales stalling, Milky Way Farm called on The Partnership to reimagine their ecommerce platform and “moove” revenue in the right direction. In the years since the site’s launch, new competition entered the market, consumer user-experience expectations shifted, and the outdated site template was no longer supported by browsers.

Finding the moments that mattered.

Diving deeper into the dot-com mechanics, The Partnership’s discovery team also identified abandoned carts, missed opportunities for email marketing tie-ins and a lack of process around sales funnel follow-up. We devised a strategy to ensure the site and integrated marketing would farm every sales opportunity in the pipeline.

We started by right-sizing the ecommerce platform. While BigCommerce is a robust solution, it doesn’t offer the same customization and scale as WooCommerce, an open plugin that requires a WordPress website and responsibility for hosting and security. While some small business owners might be deterred by these specifications, The Partnership team specializes in WordPress and was therefore well-acquainted with WooCommerce’s unique features. After migrating the existing site and sales data, the team worked to streamline the user flow through the purchase process.

With the new website launched, we turned our attention to driving interaction. Rather than let the site operate passively with organic traffic earned through search, we considered how to also push users to the site more regularly and ensure that browsing turned to buying. Analysis of the buyer journey, product promotion and email marketing led to a refreshed cart strategy aimed to reduce abandonment and email marketing optimized for open rate and click-thrus.

Where we landed.

Bringing a wholesome trusted family brand to a wider market meant enhancing an established brand with a user-friendly online experience and well-timed content to drive sales. A modern design focused on usability and frictionless payment resulted in a streamlined path-to-purchase. Quarter over quarter sales increased 11.5% while efforts to drive more traffic yielded a 10% month-over-month increase since its April launch. Reporting for the delivery drivers and administrative team at the farm was also streamlined, allowing for quicker and more efficient bottling of products.

Turns out we’re pretty good at herding milk buyers.

"The Partnership team’s support for our website, email marketing and product order platform has provided a sense of calm to our family owned and operated business. They take care of that important side of our business, so we can concentrate on producing a high-quality product. The Partnership team understands the nuances and complexities of a dairy business. They simply “get it” and that is so important."

– Iris Barham, Milky Way Farms, S.C.

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Rhea Zigmund

Rhea Zigmund brings experience helping organizations advance business objectives through strategic communications marketing.

She leads the delivery of integrated programs and projects, including strategy, planning, research, creative, internal and external communications, earned media, paid media, social media, celebrity and influencer partnerships, events and experiences, and measurement.

Prior to joining The Partnership, Rhea was Vice President at Edelman where she specialized in Healthcare and Business Transformation. She led large-scale communications marketing programs for national health organizations. She also supported partners through change and transformation, such as mergers and acquisitions, rebrands, repositionings, restructurings, and workforce challenges.

Rhea holds a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) from Georgia State University with a specialization in organizational management. She is a Prosci® Certified Change Practitioner. Originally from Kentucky, Rhea earned her Bachelor of Science in Integrated Strategic Communications from the University of Kentucky.

Living in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two dogs, Rhea spends her spare time exploring the city and working with her local foster care community.

Jeremy Hill

Over the past 20 years, I’ve specialized in digital innovation within healthcare marketing, leading efforts to enhance web development and UX/UI design. My career highlights include spearheading significant projects such as the redevelopment and replatforming of the Naples Comprehensive Health (NCH) website—a six-month initiative involving a dynamic team of 16 professionals. Additionally, I managed the digital aspects of fundraising campaigns for the Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Foundation and tackled crisis communications during hacking incidents at Northside Hospital.

I guide my teams with a philosophy centered on trust and transparency, creating an environment that encourages autonomy and bold ideas. This approach has been crucial in navigating the complex challenges of the healthcare sector and driving digital transformations that improve patient engagement and operational efficiency. As a storyteller and strategist, I am committed to leading digital service transformations and optimizing web experiences to foster growth and enhance user journeys in the healthcare industry.

Sela Missirian

Sela is a strategic brand marketer who helps brands grow through modern forms of engagement. With deep digital roots at multiple tech startups, international assignments and significant consulting expertise, she develops solution-based marketing strategies for clients to achieve their business goals.

Sela’s healthcare work spans pharmaceuticals Allergan and Pfizer, healthcare systems NCH, Piedmont Healthcare and Southwell, specialty group Dentistry for Children and medical device Kinas Medical Technologies. Other industry work includes Citrix, SAP, Voya Financial, Chick-fil-A, The Dairy Alliance and Equifax.

Sela graduated with a Bachelors in Science from Cornell University and is a regular marketing lecturer at GA Tech’s Scheller College of Business Executive MBA program.

Julie Crow

Julie Crow, SVP of Partner Services and Program Management, oversees partner relationships, including managing current partner relationships and workflows, new partner onboarding and discovery, strategic leadership of projects, operations and program management. Julie oversees the account management and project management teams.

Julie has spent her entire career as a brand strategist and marketer with leadership experience in many categories including consumer products, beauty, entertainment, wellness and non-profit.

She started her career in New York City at Colgate Palmolive and Estee Lauder, managing marketing and advertising for a variety of their signature brands. After moving to Atlanta, Julie spent her first decade working for Turner Broadcasting (now Warner Discovery) leading marketing for networks such as TBS, TNT,and Turner South. Following her Turner days, Julie ran her own marketing consulting business, focusing on brand development and marketing strategy for clients across diverse categories. Before joining The Partnership, Julie ran marketing and communications for a private high school in Atlanta and led a large economic development client team for another marketing agency.

Julie is also a certified health coach and wellness advocate and has dedicated time over the past decade to helping companies and families build programs and habits for good nutrition and healthy living.

Alex Loehrer

Bio coming soon.

Amanda Lucey

Amanda has been a communications leader, providing strategic public relations, branding and corporate communications for over 20 years. She’s the CEO of The Partnership, Atlanta’s oldest privately held agency, and an accomplished entrepreneur, having first founded Moxie Media and Marketing in 2012 (DBA M3 Effect).

The company grew tremendously within its first five years, doubling growth in 2017. To accelerate growth in 2018, Amanda acquired The Partnership in 2018. Her goal? To make The Partnership one of the fastest-growing female-owned agencies in the Southeast and a top-10 advertising agency in Atlanta and Southwest Florida. Her passion is to engage and empower her team to produce the best possible product – work that makes an impact and drives results.

She has held executive roles in both the U.K. and U.S. governments, as well as the Southeast United Dairy Industry Association. She was the Vice Consul, Head of Political, Press and Public Affairs for the British Consulate General, in which she managed all media relations strategies and delivered the UK’s policy and public diplomacy priorities. She also served as a media correspondent and director of communications for the U.S. government and has extensive public affairs experience. Prior to working in D.C., Amanda worked for the Georgia General Assembly House of Representatives.

Amanda is an accomplished public speaker, business owner and volunteer. Her motto: be hungry, keep hustling, and stay humble.

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