Fragrance Direct is a UK-based pure-play beauty retailer (makeup, skincare, and hair products) operating since 1993. They have been partners with Endless Gain for over 2 years. Initially, Fragrance Direct carried out its optimization on a 3rd party experimentation platform, but as is common, day-to-day business challenges got in the way.
Being strong advocates in experimentation, they then engaged Endless Gain to be their dedicated optimisation partner, with the brief to improve their customers’ experience and generate the business more sales and profit. Endless Gain is helping Fragrance Direct do this by conducting ongoing in-depth research, creating experiments, and personalised consumer experiences.
Research showed that the wider market awareness of Fragrance Direct could have been higher. A variety of social proof messages were successfully introduced to new customers, helping to increase the user conversion rate (UCR). These social proof experiences delivered over an 8% increase in UCR.
Fragrance Direct does very well during three gifting seasons: Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Christmas, through the Fragrance Finder page. However, research showed that traffic volumes were low on this page (even during peak periods) despite high conversion rates, and users surveyed said they didn’t know what they were looking for from a gifting point of view when they arrived on this page.
Using the testing platform’s Audiences feature, Endless Gain identified users arriving on-site either looking for gifts or unsure about what to buy. These specific user segments were prompted with the question, “Searching for a gift?”. Users who clicked on the prompt were taken to the Fragrance Finder page, where they could, through a series of personalised questions, engage with and find their desired gift.
The prompts were not shown to users who were not looking for gifts to avoid distracting them and disrupting their journey with the brand. With tactical usage, this personalised strategy delivered a 10% increase in user conversion rate for Fragrance Direct during peak periods.
Multiple pieces of research highlighted the checkout funnel as one of the key priorities. Various steps within the funnel (and the fields within them) caused considerable customer friction. Each of these elements, either singularly or combined, was likely to be harming conversions. Endless Gain redesigned multiple elements with the checkout. Through experimentation, the improvements increased the user conversion rate by 2%.