B2C E-COMMERCE

Continuous improvement through iterative marketing experimentation

Summary

How a B2C e-commerce company doubled their revenue in just 3 months

Our client, Adventa Bioscience, an innovative biotech firm, launched Trulacta, a unique first-of-its-kind supplement product with multiple health benefits available for consumer purchase and subscription via a B2C e-commerce site. After the initial product launch, Adventa was driving decent traffic to the website through paid media channels, but traffic was not converting to sales. They needed a strategy for increasing purchases without increasing the paid media spend.

Through an iterative marketing process focused on continuous improvement, we were able to rapidly test creative, messaging, and UX design across marketing channels to identify audience segments, optimize content to resonate with those audience segments, and increase our ability to convert those audiences more efficiently.

Services

Integrated Digital Marketing
Data Strategy & Analytics
Iterative Marketing
Conversion Rate Optimization Strategy
Paid Media
Creative
Landing Page UX Design
Project Management

In just three months,
we increased the add-to-cart rate by 3.8 times.

Driving efficiencies through iterative testing and ongoing optimization

Dream

Increase sales without increasing spend

We recognized a tremendous opportunity for our client to break into the market with their unique product and, in turn, grow their revenue. As with any new-to-market product, getting traction quickly was a challenge.

They had to educate consumers on a net new product unlike anything else in the market. And with a subscription-based business model, they had to create demand that drove not just one-off product purchases, but repeat purchase through subscriptions to drive sustainable growth and scale the business.

The goal was to fund the growth of their marketing program through early sales success on a limited number of channels, which meant traditional audience research to refine the targeting and value propositions before the launch of their marketing program and brand advertising aimed at driving awareness to soften the ground for conversion-oriented media to follow weren’t viable options. Our challenge became dreaming up a paid media strategy that would simultaneously generate awareness about the brand, educate users about the product, and also usher users to convert in a relatively short timeframe with a limited starting budget.

We saw a path to growth by narrowing our audience, aligning our messaging with the customer journey, and deploying a rapid test-learn-iterate approach to both optimize performance and generate insights for continued improvement.

Discover

Losing opportunity through a leaky bucket

We immediately dug into their website data to understand where there might be an opportunity to increase sales conversion by improving the experience on the website, which would allow them to drive more revenue without increasing their investment in paid media. The data showed that Adventa was experiencing a leaky bucket situation: they were spending money on paid media to drive traffic to the site, but that traffic wasn’t converting. In fact, there was a significant drop-off between the high-value actions of viewing a product and adding a product to the cart. How could we plug those holes to keep the water in the bucket? In other words, how could we get those individuals already visiting the website to make a purchase?

First, we needed to make sure Trulacta was reaching a quality audience. We sought answers to some key questions:

Are we attracting the right buyers to the site?
What stage in the journey are they in?
How should our messaging change as a result of that stage in the journey?
What’s the right high-value action to drive based on where they are in their journeys?

Then, we needed to ensure the user had a good experience once they got to the website. We considered:

What calls to action is the website focused on?
How seamless is it for a user to convert?
What pages have a greater propensity to drive conversions?
What behaviors can we drive that lead to conversion?
Where are we seeing anomalies in the data that might signal a specific friction point?

Upon digging into these questions, some immediate areas of opportunity bubbled to the surface.

Defining moment

Audience uncertainty and a poor user experience prevented consumers from converting

Our discovery questions revealed that messaging was not aligned to the various audience segments and a broken mobile experience was preventing users from completing high-value actions in the path to purchase. We needed to figure out how to connect with our target audience and improve the mobile experience for users, and we needed to do it fast.

A nimble, iterative marketing experimentation strategy aimed at both paid media channels and the website experience would allow us to quickly test variations of targeting, ad placements, ad creative, messaging, and landing page features to determine which elements were most likely to lead to a purchase and should be carried forward in the marketing program.

Increase in Revenue

0 %

Increase in add-to-cart rate

1 X

increase in mobile CVR

1 %

Do

Bringing an iterative marketing experimentation strategy to life

Prep work

We went right to work by running baseline testing on the website to establish a benchmark for future testing. While the baseline tests were running, we constructed a testing matrix that outlined the roadmap for prioritized A/B tests, including:

Current state
What elements would be tested
Hypothesized impact
Metrics to be used to measure
Baseline performance for comparison
Requirements for determining a winner

Once we had our starting point and roadmap, we were ready to roll.

Selecting the most impactful ad placements

We focused our budget on clickable, digital mediums through which we could quickly gather learnings and implement optimizations. Video ads and carousel ads outperformed static, single-image ads because they allowed us to include more information about the product to assist in educating consumers and making them product-aware, while also allowing consumers to click through to the website and get one step closer to conversion.

Engaging with the right audience

The supplement Adventa was marketing promoted many health benefits: gut health, mental health, immune system support, and better sleep. These are all different audiences with unique motivators.

We ran campaigns targeting different audiences with benefit-specific messaging to identify which were most likely to engage with the ad units. Each campaign drove to a benefit-specific landing page to ensure a consistent user experience. We prioritized audiences with the highest engagement rates for our paid media campaigns. This redirected paid media investment toward users who were most likely to engage and convert.

Meeting customers where they are in the journey

For users who engaged with specific benefits pages or content, we created specific retargeting ad content to drive relevant and more personalized ad experiences, ultimately increasing brand awareness and conversions. This included special promotions for cart abandoners.

Optimizing the user experience

Many conversion rate optimization programs default to improving the checkout flow experience, but our findings indicated that the biggest point of friction was with the add-to-cart action. We focused our testing efforts on website enhancements, particularly on mobile, that would increase add-to-cart actions and eliminate cart abandonment, which immediately impacted the conversion rate of consumers who had visited the website.

In just three months, we increased the add-to-cart rate by 3.8X.

We also tested elements in ads, in email, and in other parts of the website outside of the add-to-cart action to determine which elements resonated best with consumers and were most likely to drive action. This included testing colors in the design elements, call-to-action button sizes, logo placement, headlines, and imagery. Once an A/B test hit statistical significance and we had a clear winner, the winning optimization was made across the board and we immediately moved on to the next test. Within 90 days, the mobile conversion rate increased by 151%.

Do better

Driving continuous improvement through iterative marketing experimentation

Our iterative marketing experimentation strategy to increase conversion rate proved highly effective, both in terms of measurable improvement to conversion and in terms of gaining a better understanding of the audience. Within months of launching our tests, we had a clearer understanding of our target customers, how to message them, and how to reduce friction in their paths to conversion. Our testing strategy influenced our marketing channels, ad placements, email campaigns, and website design.

Not only did this integrated and nimble approach help Adventa double its revenue from Trulacta in just three months, but it set them up for long-term success by establishing a sustainable and agile way to evaluate and react to consumer behavior going forward.

Doing more with less

An iterative marketing experimentation strategy aimed at improving the user experience helped plug our client’s leaky bucket. They converted more website traffic into customers, greatly reducing their cost per conversion while increasing their return on ad spend and revenue. The efficiencies generated by our approach allowed our client to increase sales without increasing their advertising spend. This approach, centered around driving efficiencies, is an especially valuable resilience strategy in times of economic uncertainty, but is always effective at driving greater returns for your marketing dollars.
Iterative marketing experimentation strategies and conversion rate optimization programs can be intimidating for businesses because they require integration across a number of functions (creative, content, paid media, website design, email strategy, and analytics to name a few) and the ability to react and act at a rapid speed. That’s where Tallwave can help. If you’re ready to maximize your spend and drive near-term revenue, reach out for a free ROI analysis to determine how much incremental revenue an iterative marketing experimentation strategy could bring your business.

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