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Soft Surroundings
We’ve seen a 42% increase in conversion rate on desktop and a 35% increase on mobile
BACKGROUND
BACKGROUND
Soft Surroundings is a women's lifestyle brand, that offers unique and comfortable apparel, luxury bedding, and a range of beauty and fragrance products through its ecommerce site, catalog sales center, and 80 store locations across the U.S.
The digital marketing team at SoftSurroundings has tremendous experience in data analysis. However, it did not focus on improving site conversion rates. The VP of marketing at Soft Surroundings was looking to improve online sales, strengthen online brand awareness, and increases the average order value.
THE CHALLENGE
Prior to hiring Invesp, the marketing team at Soft Surroundings did not run any type of experimentation on the site. In addition, the technical team did not have the capacity to handle implementing tests since they were already busy with a large list of internal projects.
“We started as a catalog company where the primary driver of business was mailing out catalogs and receiving orders via phone. We had a website, but it wasn’t our major driver of sales. We knew that there was room to grow our website and optimize it for usability.”
Gail Buffington,
VP of Marketing & Analytics
The marketing team had handled most usability issues on the site. So, increasing conversion rates would require digging deeper into more complex conversion related items, branding, and persuasive messaging.
Although the site received a large number of monthly visitors, its conversion rate was low. The majority of the site traffic was coming on mobile devices. Yet, the mobile conversion rates were about 50% of the desktop conversion rates.
THE SOLUTION
Soft Surroundings decided to hire Invesp a month before the holiday season (Black Friday & Cyber Monday).
Our team for the project included a strategic lead, a senior CRO specialist, senior UX designer, analytics specialist and a technical lead.
Invesp followed its SHIP process to identify conversion opportunities on Soft Surroundings site and marketing campaigns.
We started by talking to customers through conducting several JTBD interviews.
“They started out by doing a number of customer interviews to see how customers were using the site and their idea of the brand. They also did heat mapping of the website to see where pain points were. This helped layout a road map for what we needed to do.”
Gail Buffington,
VP of Marketing & Analytics
During the research phase, our team ran expert reviews to identify conversion bottlenecks, setup analytics goals, additional event tracking, and ran usability tests on the site.
We identified over a hundred conversion opportunities on the site and its different marketing campaigns.
After prioritizing the conversion list, we started tackling them by creating new designs, and testing these designs against the existing site.
“Their work was end-to-end, so after the research phase was complete, they did development, creative, and testing. We provided strict brand guidelines for the design of the website and approved updates as they went along.”
Gail Buffington,
VP of Marketing & AnalyticsThe project with SoftSurroundings helped bring bridge the gap between online and offline worlds.
“We’re currently working on additional tests to gauge what customers want. We’re setting up a test for putting a digital copy of our catalog online. They’re helping make a more seamless omnichannel experience between the catalog and digital offerings.”
Gail Buffington,
VP of Marketing & AnalyticsTHE RESULTS
The project resulted in a 22x return for Soft Surroundings.
“We’ve seen a 42% increase in conversion rate on desktop and a 35% increase on mobile since Q4 2019”
In addition, the user complaints from the site dropped as well:
“We have a widget on the website where we get user feedback. Since we started working with Invesp, the number of complaints we’ve gotten about the website has decreased significantly.”
Our team works closely with clients in a transparent way. Our team runs an average of 11 experiments on SoftSurroundings site at any point in time. That requires a lot of communication between the two teams:
“They’re incredibly responsive and keep us informed on where they’re at in the process. It’s very transparent. We use Slack for day-to-day communication, and we use Trello to track projects. We have several boards that designate where a task is in terms of progression. We can also add ideas that we have on Trello.”