Gift Tree

Our team managed to increase the overall conversion rate of Gift Tree by 10% in terms of conversions.

Ecommerce
DTC
B2C
Medium

BACKGROUND

Gift Tree is an eCommerce brand, headquartered in Vancouver, founded in 1997 by Craig Bowen and Esther Díez. Being in the gifting industry, the brand offers a curated collection of products for holidays, promotions, and every-day gifting moments for individuals, corporations, and businesses in a way that makes the gift buying experience easy and seamless.

Challenges:

Train/educate them on how to run multivariate tests on their unique eCommerce platform.
Their conversion rate was significantly low, despite having decent traffic on their site.
The marketing team did not have a background in running experiments. Meaning that they had never launched any experimentation program to see how good their platform was.

THE CHALLENGE

Gift Tree hired Invesp at a time when they were experiencing an always low conversion rate. Even though Gift Tree’s marketing team was talented and dedicated, they didn’t have enough conversion optimization experience.

“We saw some bits of improvement in our conversion rate, but the process was not consistent. It was slow most of the time. We have a group of really dedicated employees, but sometimes you need somebody who is an expert to come in and point out areas that you may be not addressing correctly.”

Craig Bowen,

CEO

Unlike most of the online stores, Gift Tree was using their eCommerce platform. This meant that our team had first to understand how their system works before increasing their conversion rate. Also, having a unique eCommerce platform meant that our team was to run several multivariate tests to see if Gift Tree’s eCommerce system wasn’t meddling with customers’ expectations. Our team also had to design a customized testing model to suit their Gift Tree’s unique platform.

Solutions:

Comprehensive conversion audit to Identify and prioritize conversion issues
Comprehensive user behavioral research to understand user motivations
Comprehensive data analysis and analytics configuration to track users’s activity on the site
Identify and run experiments on different parts of the site to improve conversion rates and average order value
Design, develop and run AB experiments on the site
Track & report results on weekly basis to the team

THE SOLUTION

We deployed a team that consisted of a strategist lead, senior CRO specialist, senior UX designer, and senior frontend developer. A few days into our SHIP optimization process, we were able to identify a list of conversion bottlenecks on the Gift Tree website. We used a combination of expert reviews, user behavioral research, and other conversion research techniques to develop an accurate approach to improving conversion rates. We also identified several new revenue opportunities during the research phase that the Gift Tree brand had not tried yet. The team ranked the issues using our prioritization framework to determine which issues will most impact the bottom line while requiring the least amount of effort. Most importantly, we wanted to see customers’ behavior on different pages as well as the emotional and social pull of the product that was pushing them towards the conversion path. Additionally, having mapped out the exact testing landscape, we went into high-velocity testing focusing on both mobile and desktop. We launched 6 to 8 experiments every month to determine which optimization treatment would work best for the site. Our team conducted weekly status meetings to keep the Gift Tree team updated about the different experiments’ status, discuss new testing plans, and receive feedback on the current work.

THE RESULTS

“Invesp has an extensive customer base, and they have seen a lot of different industries. Although they had never worked with anyone from our industry, their methodology worked well for us.”

Craig Bowen,

CEO

The team managed to craft a customized experimentation model to use on their unique eCommerce platform. Our team managed to increase the overall conversion rate of Gift Tree by 10% in terms of conversions.