The Skin Deep: User Experience Overhaul and 30% Conversion Increase

Intro

After the success of their Emmy-winning documentary which chronicled the emotional conversations between people, the team at The Skin Deep launched {THE AND} card game as a way to bring the documentary experience home to their viewers.

With 199 questions per deck, the cards allow people to easily experience more meaningful connections from literally anywhere.

The Problem

The Skin Deep team came to Blue Stout after a 6-month hot streak.
Most of their early sales were attributed to clever advertising campaigns on Facebook displaying well-produced video content from their documentary to a narrowly targeted warm audience.

However, The Skin Deep team was concerned about investing more money into advertising, knowing that the current Shopify Plus site was not optimized and was likely leaking customers.

The Skin Deep engaged Blue Stout to perform our comprehensive BluePrint audit of their analytics, store design and email to uncover all the critical elements missing causing them to hemorrhage potential customers.

Here is what we found:

• Visitors to the site, who did not see the ads, were not converting. Nothing explained to new visitors who The Skin Deep was or why {THE AND} card game was different from alternatives.

• First time visitors were confused by product choices. They couldn’t tell the difference between the various card game sets or which one was right for them.

• With over 90% of traffic from mobile, customers were dropping out of the purchase funnel at an alarming rate as the mobile site experience was cumbersome and difficult to navigate.

Without improved conversion rates and a new site focusing on the customers’ experience (with special emphasis on the mobile), The Skin Deep was going to hit a hard ceiling trying to scale with advertising.

The Approach

In order to continue their growth trajectory, The Skin Deep needed to improve the customer experience to continue converting new visitors from ads as they expanded into new, un-aware audiences.

We first focused on redesigning the homepage to clearly explain the unique value The Skin Deep delivered. And most importantly, HOW their process of creating questions for their card game was unique as compared to alternatives.

We avoided over detailed product specs and instead focused on the unique story of The Skin Deep, how they create their products, and what they stand for.

The result was a 68% increase in mobile homepage conversion rate, a 93% increase in desktop and tablet conversion rate and a 28% decrease in the mobile homepage bounce rate.

Product Page.

Our objective was to increase product desirability for first time visitors landing on the product page, while also helping them understand which product was right for them.

Since the majority of people entering the product page are first time customers, we needed a simple way to answer the question: “Who is this product right for?”

We crafted a layout that emphasized copy and video assets to increase the emotional desire for the game while still providing easy access to answers for customers’ top questions.

Overall, the redesign and relaunch of The Skin Deep website on Shopify Plus allowed the brand to charge into a record Q4.

As the brand scaled traffic by over 60% after the launch (mainly from new audiences), we would have expected a decrease in site performance as new “cold” visitors tend to convert less. Instead, we saw a dramatic increase in conversion rates and engagement, noted below. All due to the enhancements made to improve the customer journey of new visitors.

Summary of Improved Stats

• 30% Increase in Conversion Rate (site wide)

• 93% Increase in Desktop & Tablet Homepage Conversion Rate

• 68% Increase in Mobile Homepage Conversion Rate

• 28% Decrease in Mobile Homepage Bounce Rate

• 19% Increase in Avg Session Duration (site wide)