Case Studies: Chapter 5 – Beauty Brand Reduces Bounces by 20%
Case study: A beauty brand reduces bounce rates by 20% with an unexpected approach to content
The Credit Card company and New Avon case studies were ultimately both about identifying what content is most persuasive to customers and lifting that content further up on the page to give it more visibility. Here is a different content optimization use case so that the reader doesn’t come away thinking that the above is all that there is to day-to-day content optimization. This case study is from another iconic luxury brand in fashion and beauty.
The Challenge and Opportunity
The company was seeing great engagement on its site. However, Google Analytics showed that some customers were abandoning after visiting product detail pages (PDP).
As always with traditional analytics, the question jumped up as to why these customers abandoned and how to improve the behavior. The assumption was that many of these customers leaving hopefully to visit a brick-and-mortar store then.
However, since you cannot be sure about that, especially during the pandemic, the opportunity was to entice more customers to complete a purchase while still on the site. Or, at least make it more likely that they will actually visit a store by engaging them further.
Step 1: What are the golden paths on the product display pages?
When you are on a quest to answer why customers abandon, the first step is to look at the in-page journeys on the last page before exiting the site, i.e., in this case, the PDP.
The starting point of choice for this is Zone-based Heatmaps because they show behavior in aggregate in a statistically significant way.
When the consulting colleagues from Contentsquare looked at the behavior in exposure rate heatmaps something unusual jumped out. Namely, you usually see a significant drop off in exposure to content under the fold, i.e., many customers typically give up scrolling at some point and abandon.
But in the case of this luxury brand, a larger percentage of customers kept scrolling to the bottom of the pages.
Likewise, engagement time also showed that these customers were not just flicking the page to the bottom, but they were spending time with the content elements — especially on images of the brand’s iconic products—true fans, in other words.
Step 2: What A/B test is most likely to reduce PDP abandonment?
What jumped out is that these customers are genuinely engaged and love the brand’s iconic products and their picture-based storytelling. But when they reach the bottom of a page, they often abandon the site.
So, the hypothesis was that an A/B test that engages fans with image-based hyperlinks to additional products would likely reduce abandonment. As a result, the brand tested adding images of their iconic products to the bottom of these product detail pages, hyperlinked to additional products.
Illustration: A/B test of adding the brand’s iconic product imagery to the bottom of pages to continue engaging customers on the site
The result and value
The A/B test was as successful as expected for reducing abandonment from PDPs, namely by a massive 20%. In other words, this simple change increased flow to additional products by 20% and ultimately increased checkouts too. It’s easy to imagine the significant financial value.
The moral of the story
Who would ever think that the bottom of pages would be prime real estate? Yet, it is in the case of this luxury brand and its fans. Their customers essentially showed them how to create an even better content experience.
The moral is to listen to your customers; you can find the answer to better content experiences there.