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
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“Make a Milkbone Moment” is a photo-contest site dedicated to celebrating Milkbone’s 100th anniversary. The contest seems simple: submit a photo with you and your dog and your dog could be the next Milkbone spokesdog, with an attractive $100,000 signing bonus. Entry for the contest was conducted both on the site, and through a mobile tour with an interactive kiosk to receive entries (and a photographer to take pictures of pet owners and their dogs). Currently 100 winners were selected by a panel of judges, and are now up for public voting on the site. It’s a very cute concept, but as an audience member the main problem I experienced was the barrier to participation: once I wanted to vote or share a picture, I was prompted to register for the site. Case Study