30% Growth For Online Retailer By Mapping Customer Decisions

A large online retailer who many of us buy from on a regular basis sells thousands of products online in dozens of categories.  They noticed a big drop in conversion rates and revenue per client and didn’t know why.

They went to McKinsey & Company for help, who did a 20,000 person study on consumer behavior and how selling and marketing to consumers has changed.  They identified where efforts should be directed to yield the highest return on marketing efforts.  Click here to read a great brief about the study – “The Consumer Decision Journey.”

Key Findings

• They dug deep into existing online analytics to study the correlation between purchases and quantity of product per category
• They used segmentation to calculate likelihood that customers in each category would “cross the aisle” and buy something in another category
• After digging into the data, they found the lifetime value of a toy buyer increased greatly when they bought in other categories
• Conversely, consumers who bought a lot of pet products did not buy frequently in other categories
• After studying their consumer decision journeys they developed cross-selling and category penetration techniques to grow the lifetime value per customer
• 6 months into this project yielded a jump of 25% in email conversions, 60% increase in on-site conversions, increase in overall sales of 20% and and overall ROI of 30%.

Click here to read full case study