The Overview
The Italian market is highly competitive in wholesale retailers that sell their brands online – there, the competition is outstanding and challenging compared to other markets.
The Challenge
Cinzia Ciano launched their company 30 years ago, becoming year over year the best reseller in exclusive high fashion brands wholesale in the south of Italy. They tried to throw Base Abbigliamento, but the initial launch saw a significant spike in traffic and sales. Still, they were unclear on maintaining continued online sales and conversion growth. The brand saw solid holiday season sales, but their off-peak times resulted in a noticeable slowdown, leading Base to consider a more practical and custom growth strategy than the others for converting more and gathering new audiences in their shop.
To discover why Base was not converting their visitors to their full potential during off-peak seasons, we began by digging into the data site visitors and customer base. Then, we rolled out a Market Test that drove x5 sales than the media budget invested!
Upon conclusion of the Market Test, we noticed their audience's most critical features and how they interacted online, which helped us plan the next step to roll out.
After this test, we gathered all the insights to uplift sales quickly and added a new revenue stream currently rolling out in a strict roadmap of growth activities.
The Solution
In the first stage of our work with Base Abbigliamento, we took a deep look at their site analytics and visitor interaction data through our audit to understand their consumer profiles and on-site behaviours on a deeper level. We discovered many customer types engaging with the website uniquely and encountering outstanding conversion blockers in this initial stage.
We discovered one segment visiting the website primarily on their mobile devices while located in food, tv-series and similar, which indicated they had a high affinity for young audiences. Therefore, a trigger for them could be to create a testing matrix based on similar audiences. Due to upcoming discoveries, our optimisation efforts toward improvements in mobile site optimisation, checkout, site speed performance and visual merchandising.
The next segment, in contrast, was visiting the site from a desktop computer, arriving by way of paid search. This segment was moving like they were shopping in a retail store, with a long Customer Journey and timing on-page; they browsed looking for something to buy similar to a new product or alternative one and asking Customer Care for recommendations. As a result, we optimised the filter in the category and the search results for this kind of shopper. Our improvement efforts for this audience were directed toward easing purchase decision-making, building effective automation and a multi-channel strategy to test everything before scaling it up in the upcoming months.
We identified the primarily interested audiences and created the automation that continuously keeps traffic and sales. We noticed that some specific segments often visited more than once daily and typically to particular product pages. This segment is savvy at seeking online deals and knows how to navigate several competing sites quickly to compare a single product. Our comprehensive approach to solving the challenges was to first move toward an utterly pain-free user experience to reduce user experience annoyances and bounce rate.
Therefore, we crafted market research, analysed the potential audience's and their pains and gains, and rolled out a data-driven marketing strategy to acquire new customers and retain them with automation and a customised promotion plan.
Results
The initial audit and ongoing iterative tests have helped drive better engagement and revenue. In fact, as a result of Base's work with us, they saw their revenue grow 400% YoY – their overall online visitors grew, and x5 significantly decreased cost per click.
+400% Increase in Sales YoY
x5 decreased in CPC (Cost per Click)
