Case Study | 51.28% Boost in Sales in 3 Months w/ these strategies

Case Study:

We increased sales by over 51.28% in 3 Months with CRO & A/B-Testing…

Sharing a post written by Carl, a CRO expert accelerating the growth of D2C-brands

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We started working with this client StayCold Apparel in March 2021.

They had a really unique approach: they have exclusive designs in limited quantities. So whenever a product is sold out, it’s gone forever.

In the first 3 Months of working together we increased their annual baseline by +$1,762,852.

You wonder how we did it?

Let me show you our exact CRO & A/B-Testing Approach and breakdown.

First things first: What exactly does CRO & A/B-Testing mean?

A quick example:

Let’s say you spend money on ads and you get 100 people in your store and 3 of them buy. Imagine if with the same ad spend you could have 5 people out of every 100 people buy.

The best way to do this is by boosting your Conversion-Rate.

The simplest way to do so is by breaking down data, using that data to create hypotheses and then testing those hypotheses on your website.

If amazon changes the color of their CTA, they would change revenue by multi-million dollars… a specific test on your site can make or break your site.

You need to make a smart hypothesis, based on your data. use those data points to create exceptional tests that boost your conversion rate.

So Let me show you our exact step-by-step approach of how we boosted their Conversion-Rate by over 66.47% in the first 6 Months of working together.

Background on Brand & Approach

As I mentioned: Once an item is sold out, it is "Sold Out Forever" and will never be available again.

This means that there is a shortage of supply right from the start and therefore the risk that customers will go empty-handed if they wait too long to place their order.

We wanted to build on that. So in our CRO-Process we worked a lot with Scarcity and Urgency as a Trigger.

To give you a quick birds-eye-view Overview of the Process that we use:

1. First step is gathering and understanding Data on how Users are interacting with the store and what their psychology (Pains, Needs, Motifs & Desires) is.

2. Second Step is coming up with Ideas based on that data. We then form Ideas into hypotheses (If… Then… Because…).

3. Third Step is to then take those hypotheses and verify them in a Systematic Approach to see what works and what doesn’t: We split-test them against the Live Store.

With this approach, we can increase the Conversion-Rate and other KPI’s step-by-step in a scientific framework.

Breakdown of everything we did

Test Number 01: Home Page

With the first test, I’ll give a detailed breakdown of how we analyze data and come up with testing ideas based on that.

On the home page of Stay Cold Apparel, a video was automatically played in the AtF section to hint at the current collection.

If you scroll down the homepage, you can see the individual products and take a closer look at them.

However, by analyzing user behavior in Analytics (Event Flow Report), Hotjar heatmaps, and screen recordings, we were able to see that only very few people scroll down on the home page as previously assumed.

What Hotjar showed us is that they’d first click on the Menu and then click on one of these three Collections: Tees, Sweatshirts, or the newest Releases.

This was also supported by Google Analytics Report:

It showed us that 98-99% of users click on these 3 collections.

So our Hypothesis was the following:

IF we replace the distracting video in the start area with a static image and show the most frequently used menu items directly in the AtF area on the home page,

THEN more visitors will place an order,

BECAUSE they will find it much easier to get to their desired products without any detours.

So what we did is take the 3 most clicked collections and put them directly in the Above the Fold.

And what this does is reduce the amount of clicks that a User has to do in order to get to the products they want to buy… From 2 clicks to only 1 click.

This may seem like a small change but actually increased the CVR by 16.21% when we split-tested it.

Test Number 02: PDP - Late Image

One of the main problems with mobile devices is that there is not a lot of space to display all the information.

This can be a problem for websites that have a lot of content…

Because most visitors don't scroll down at all and therefore miss out on a lot of relevant information.

So our Hypothesis was the following:

IF we delay the images so that they appear after 2 seconds,

THEN Conversion-Rate will increase,

BECAUSE the User perceives more of the important information even if he doesn’t scroll down too far.

—--CHECK THE VIDEO HERE!!!--- 

This increased the Revenue-per-User by 9.35%

Test Number 03: PDP

At Stay Cold Apparel new collections with new limited designs are dropped every now and then.

From customer surveys we have learned the following:

Many customers took too much time with the purchase and ended up empty-handed…

Because they either did not know that the Products were limited or did not know how much stock was still available.

So our Hypothesis was the following:

IF we display a stock indicator on the PDP that shows the visitor the current stock of the design, conveys that it is limited in quantity, and shows how in-demand it is

THEN more visitors will place their order

BECAUSE they see how scarce/demanded the design is and they don't want to go empty-handed.

In the before Version of the Product Page there is no hint, that customers are buying limited products:

So we took Data from the shopify backend to make sure that Users understand the Scarcity of the Products. Also we took real-time Google Analytics Data to show how many Users are on the PDP too.

This beautifully combines FOMO (Fear of missing out) and Social Proof. And it drove up sales by over 12%.

You want to make sure to custom-code this to be trustworthy.

Test Number 04: Cart-Drawer

After seeing these psychological effects working really well on the Product-Page we wanted to make sure to also use them in the Cart.

Therefore our Hypothesis was the following:

IF we show customers how many other customers have the same item in their cart at the same time,

THEN more customers will complete the purchase,

BECAUSE they will not postpone the purchase to minimize the risk of not getting the item.

By the way, it was important to us that we did not lie to the customer with arbitrary made-up data as usual when using this lever but only used the real numbers for the test.

If no one else had the item in the shopping cart, the number was not made up - and as we can see, we were rewarded for it.

Although the programming effort was 10x higher than if we had simply used fake numbers....

Let’s have a look at what the Cart looked like before:

So here again we took the GA data to show how many people are checking out right now.

With this you are adding congruence throughout the customer journey.

This worked really well and drove up sales by over 16%.

Conclusion

Every single day you’re bleeding out on extra revenue.

The easiest way to make more money from all of your traffic with 0 extra Ad spend is not email marketing… It's Conversion-Rate-Optimization!

You should always be A/B testing macro and micro changes to your pages. A day without a test running is leaving $$ on the table.

We both know that just reading won't help, so here's what I want you to do next!

1. Go out there and implement these strategies

2. Book a call to see how we can work together: 

- Carl