How Conversion Rate Optimization Drove a 470% Boost in Conversion Rate for an Online Jewelry Retailer

Here's one example of Adept’s truly strategic approach when tackling conversion rate optimization (CRO) for an online jewelry retailer who had recently launched a brand-new website. 

The strategy resulted in major success - increases in traffic, purchases, average order value and revenue. It doesn’t get much better than that!

The Goal

There were three main goals of conversion rate optimization for the online jewelry retailer:

  1. Build a brand reputation and start generating sales
  2. Understand visitors' purchase intent and behavior
  3. Use that data to increase online revenue and e-commerce conversion rate

Framework and Planning

One key starting point for the Adept team is the 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Page Design by Tim Ash. It looks at areas such as calls to action, visual distractions, and trust factors, and is a good way to troubleshoot key pages on a website to identify potential issues that CRO can address.

The first step is analysis.

The big question Adept seeks to answer is whether the business's target customers are seeing key messaging. If they're not, then that's a problem. To figure this out, the team must:

  • Check that all website tracking software is working correctly
  • Assess customer activity via heatmaps and mouse-tracking technology
  • Identify pages that are good targets for CRO.

Adept reviews pages with the highest traffic volume and those that help with the decision-making process. The biggest testing points are the critical intersection points: home pages, product pages for e-commerce sites and checkout pages.

Overall, the goal is to assess the effectiveness of common conversion points and to highlight any parts of the site where visitors may be confused about what to do next.

Step 2 is planning.

Based on the data collected, Adept creates a roadmap that:

  • Identifies opportunities and weaknesses in the conversion funnel
  • Helps the team come up with hypotheses
  • Specifies what elements need to be tested and what tests will be carried out

The goal is to use the power of intelligent web conversion testing to create a website that is both visitor focused and optimized for conversions and improved revenue. It is a constant cycle.

CRO in Action: The Tests

So how did this approach work in the case of the jewelry retailer's new website? Prior to testing, the retailer had an e-commerce conversion rate of 0.44% with 12,000 visitors a month.

Test 1 - Increasing Purchase Rate and Clickthroughs

The first goal was to increase the rate of purchases from the home page and improve the clickthrough rate (CTR) to category pages. Adept hypothesized that:

  • Lifestyle images would help visitors to better able to visualize how jewelry items would look on them.
  • Image treatments would give the home page a more polished look.
  • Centering category titles over images would help visitors better identify what they were looking for.

So Adept tweaked the homepage design to test this. The result: an 11.3% increase in purchase rate for completed checkouts.

Test 2 - Increasing Product Page Conversion Rates

The second test had the aim of increasing the conversion rate on product pages. Free shipping boosts conversions, but while the jewelry retailer offered free shipping, that wasn't very obvious. Adept hypothesized that a callout of free shipping and returns would help convert new visitors into buyers. Adept added a callout above the "add to cart" button.

The result: an 82% increase in conversion rate.

Test 3 - Increasing Membership

The jewelry retailer wanted to increase member signups to enable future marketing. Based on its own experience Adept hypothesized that changing the CTA on the home page button would be more inviting. The original CTA read "request access today"; the variation invited visitors to join the manufacturer.

The result: Not only did the new CTA increase new member signups by 30% but there was also a 63% rise in completed checkouts.

Overall Results

Overall, Adept's testing approach has been hugely successful for the jewelry retailer. Traffic to the site increased by 1,000 per month, average order value rose and there was a huge revenue increase. But the biggest win was the conversion rate, which rose 470% - from 0.44% to 2.5%.

What’s the lesson? Testing can teach you about your website and your visitors and improve your business exponentially.

Adept's approach can best be summarized as "always be testing". A constant cycle of tweaking, testing and feedback is keeps sites converting well and results in even more sales traffic and ROI for both new and existing sites.