A 1720% Uplift In Less Than 90 Days

The Challenge

The Skin Shark is an ecommerce business that provides skin care solutions for acne-prone skin.

Being new to the market, they were up against some eCommerce giants.

Their product was good. They had customers. They just needed help turning more traffic on their website into customers.

At a conversion rate of only 0.22%, the website was leaking revenue.

And they didn’t have the skills or resources internally to understand how to fix it.

The key areas of challenge for The Skin Shark were:

• A lack of time to be able to invest in research and optimisation on the website
• They were a lean team with other priorities at play. They needed assistance in delivering more work in less time.
• They lacked the skills internally to be able to run a successful optimisation program and deliver it on time and on budget.

They reached out to us to see how we could help them improve their conversion rate.

Because The Skin Shark was in its infancy, they lacked a sufficient amount of traffic to be able to do A/B testing.

And due to the nature of their challenge, we needed to look at alternative solutions for optimisation.

The Research

With no testing as part of the overall program, we needed to dive deep into research. The SimplyCRO team set out to understand:

• The key motivations, pain points, questions and uncertainties of the target market
• The skin care market overall and how this tied into the target market and their motivations 
• To understand what was happening when they were on the website 
• What was causing the drop off at critical parts of the funnel

For this, the following research tactics were leveraged:

• Google Analytics Audit
• Heuristic Analysis
• Technical Analysis
• Heatmap Analysis
• Web Polls
• Chat Log Analysis
• Message Mining
• Session Recordings
• Competitor Analysis

The Insights

We could see that 91% of their traffic was new visitors – and they were coming from paid social channels.

This was an indication that the traffic coming through likely saw an ad, had a lower buying intent and were likely ‘just browsing’ when landing on the site.

Our objective was to optimise aspects of the product page that would have an immediate impact. As it stood, their offer and value proposition was unclear on site and so our aim was to highlight this, as well as cleaning up the UX/UI.

A lot of the elements they needed, they had. It was just a matter of understanding what was most important to the user and putting it in front of them strategically.

Increase trust and credibility through social proof

Social proof was important in this market (most people when shopping for skin care online need to know that the products are good quality and that they achieve the results they desire). 

Whilst The Skin Shark had product specific reviews on the page, we wanted to emphasise this element to build more trust and credibility around the product quality and the results that it achieves.

To do so, we introduced influencer videos on the page, as well as additional content blocks breaking down the formula of the products and how it works.

In the end, we focused on optimising the product pages and collections pages of the website as they were critical steps in the conversion funnel.