Legal Things
In compliance with my non-disclosure agreement, I’ve obscured confidential information. This case study presents my own ideas and work and may have been summarized, re-created or altered to maintain confidentiality.
Impact of Mother’s Day
The project began with research on Mother’s Day in order to inform the best path for design. The numbers I found were beyond my expectations. I never realized how big of a shopping day this was, outside of restaurants and greeting cards.
As it pertains to fresh flowers and plants, Mother’s Day ranks the third busiest shopping and retail day every year (after Valentine’s Day and Christmas).
Flower and plant purchases for the holiday are a staggering 26% (tied with Christmas) of all holiday transactions. In fact, in 2023 it’s upwards of $35.7 billion. Needless to say, it’s a huge market.
Bouqs has a unique and strategic market placement in that they are a company that can cater to the online shoppers, the florist shoppers and even the small business category, since they partner with farmers directly.
This gives a huge advantage for market share. Based on the chart below, it could be a reach of up to 88% of shoppers if positioned efficiently.
Haunted by Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is a real problem that haunts online retailers. We’ve all done it. A customer adds something to their cart and for one reason or another, leaves the site.
Most of the time, cart abandonment is due to high taxes or shipping costs. In flower retail, this is especially difficult to reconcile because they are perishable.
The scary truth is that the typical cart abandonment rate is just shy of 70%, which translates into about $18 billion in lost revenue every year. Of course, there are countless reasons why this may happen and this statistic is increased in mobile devices.
- Over 80% of mobile shoppers abandon their carts.
- Up to 70% of shoppers abandon their carts when they see shipping costs.
- 18% of online shoppers would rather not purchase than go through a complicated checkout process.
Turning Shoppers Into Customers
Cart abandonment is just a psychological phenomenon that is a part of online business. The good news is that with a little strategy these shoppers can be converted into happy customers, but it takes some finesse.
I continued my research toward ways to retain customers. Since tax is unavoidable, the key problems to solve were getting around heavy shipping costs and targeting potential customers with email.
How could we make an offer too good to refuse?
I learned that almost 80% of people are more likely to shop online when they’re offered free shipping, especially those under 25 (which is a rapidly growing group of shoppers)
Flower Subscriptions
One of the really valuable experiences from Bouqs is their subscription service. It’s a set it and forget it type of thing and is quite brilliant. At the time, this was a new feature that was to be introduced in time for Mother’s Day. One of my tasks as a consultant was to build out a way to manage these subscriptions.
To start, I mapped out a user flow. This was crucial to determine what we needed, where customers could abandon and how we could potentially win them back.
Next, using Adobe Illustrator, I created initial wireframes to get an overview of the process.
Free shipping was an important perk of subscriptions and solves one of the biggest problems we found.
Due to my non disclosure agreement, I’m unable to show more of this process. However, if you’d like to know more about this particular part of the project, feel free to reach out and we can discuss.
Email Campaign Review
My next task was to review the email campaigns to see what we could optimize and tailor them towards completing a shopping journey. As subscriptions were shaping up, free shipping was taken care of. But we still needed a way to address the cart abandonment issue for those who may not yet be subscribers.
The timing strategy for emails is a trade secret, which I can’t disclose. But I did line up the emails all in a row to determine consistency., which turned out to be a useful exercise.
I noticed that there wasn’t much consistency between them and the copy was perhaps a bit too lengthy to be effective. There was also an important need to show what was in the cart, but in the original versions, it was hidden in small print at the top.
Next, we sent out a survey. Interestingly, customers were confused about the lamb and were unsure how it was relevant to flowers. This along with the small print seemed to be a distraction from the call to action that we wanted (Go to my cart).
A revamp of the imagery was where I started the redesign. Since flowers are beautiful, it wasn’t too difficult to find a suitable replacement.
Updated Copy
Next was the copy. What was the message that we wanted to convey and how could we streamline that message? We also wanted to include an opportunity to upsell, which is important for any business.
I A/B tested traditional copy over something a bit more clever and fun. Clever and fun had a better conversion rate and it stuck. Here are the revised versions that performed much better.
First the wireframes.
Then, high-fidelity of Version A.
Lastly, high-fidelity of Version B.
Analytics and the Future
The last step in this project was to document the strategy that we implemented. We also wanted to make sure analytics were properly set up on the new website to capture the most data we could in time for Mother’s Day.
I worked with the frontend and customer support teams to implement testing criteria and update the designs for release.
Although there aren’t specific numbers that can be shared, the updates seemed to be working. Research suggests that sales and revenue were up year-over-year, customer engagement had significantly improved and subscriptions increased.
Overall, I learned a lot about marketing, language and metrics to measure. It was fun to create new ways to reach more customers and a great exercise in copywriting.