5x Clickthrough Rate

in collaboration with:

Conversion Rate Optimization Manager,
VP of E-Commerce,
Senior UX Designer,
Copywriter,
Graphic Designers,
VP of Brand,
Website Project Manager,
Art Director,
Business Intelligence Manager, and
E-mail Marketing Specialist

My role: UX designer
Business: Solo Stove is a direct-to-consumer, e-commerce startup specializing in fire pits and other outdoor gear and backyard products.
Project duration: March 2021 - May 2021

The company struggled to sell its charcoal grill.

Sitting inventory costs money and warehouse space, so this e-commerce startup saw an opportunity to jumpstart sales for its unpopular grill at BBQ season's onset. Emails and landing pages were its most profitable sales channel, so the Marketing department strategized on a Memorial Day campaign for the Grill.

As the UX designer, I was tasked with improving the clickthrough rate on the existing landing page so that more users would complete their purchase on the store website.

The existing landing page was a dumpster fire.

It had a 0.8% average click-thru rate whereas others had 3%. The Brand team designed it with no UX involvement. Once ownership was handed over to me, I identified several problems:

• An explosion of content with no information scent
  
• Excessive marketing copy and deficient in valuable, useful, and factual information
  
• Inaccessible color combinations and text as images
  
• Ad-like aesthetic could turn away users
  
• Non-responsive layout designed for desktop when 80% of page visits came from mobile devices.
  

Users said its selling points weren't lit.

On UserZoom, I recruited 10 participants for an unmoderated usability test. Questions focused on product education, particularly on whether or not they could identify reasons for buying the Grill.

• 10 of the 10 skipped over the long chunks of text.
  
• 10 of the 10 were unable to explain what made this grill better than similar products they used in the past.
  
• 8 of the 10 complained of the lack of concrete details.
  

Studying the competitive landscape, I learned how poorly this product fit in the market. Most of its parts and features were standard, yet it retailed at $774.99 when popular grills at the time sold for less than half. It also required users to sit or bend because of its low height, whereas most operated at standing height.

So I hosed the landing page down to its basic elements.

Reducing the whole to its pieces enabled me to make sense of the content and start fresh. I then applied the learnings from the usability test to prioritize and rearrange the pieces.

Hypothesis: Users would engage more with a page that resembles a product details page, not an ad.

Using Heap, the CRO Manager and I looked at user analytics and found that past customers were likelier to purchase if they had visited the Grill's product details page in addition to the landing page.

The landing page needed to be a trustworthy destination that prioritized and highlighted essential information.

An insight from Baymard Institute: Users need to understand what a product is before they can appreciate its benefits.

The new design withstood heat from stakeholders.

It was awkward presenting to the VP of Brand--the stakeholder who directed the original landing page design--but I delivered rationales for the design changes:

• Basic information upfront: Baymard studies suggested that users need to first see a variety of product views and that product descriptions are most easily read in a mix of paragraph and list form.
  
• Social proof: Publication logos replaced customer testimonials that sounded disingenuous to study participants.
  
• Tangible product claims: Users needed a concrete frame of reference in order to evaluate any marketing claims.
  
• Succinct copy: Concise descriptors replaced the essays to ease readability.
  

Ultimately, the VP of Brand admitted that the previous approach lacked content strategy and that I infused clarity into the design. All stakeholders approved it for launch.

left: desktop, right: mobile

And we had a hot grill summer!

The two pages--the old page as the control vs new--were A/B tested over a two-week period using the landing page builder Unbounce. I achieved the goal of bringing more users onto the site, demonstrating the value of research, testing, and user-centered design.

Accomplishments:

• This design became a template for other landing pages.
  
• The new design yielded more purchases than the old design.
  
• The new design saw >15% CTR, compared to the original's <3%.