Different Paths for Two Beauty Brands Facing Falling Conversion & Sales

Borrowed

"The Holy Grail in discovery—for either Design or sales—is the same: it’s deeply understanding your client and their customers."

From "Naked Sales: How Design Thinking Reveals Customer Motives and Drives Revenue" by Ashley Welch, Justin Jones [Book]

Learned

Two prospective client conversations stand out from the last couple of weeks. They're both beauty brands dealing with similar challenges—falling conversion rates and declining sales. Neither have any idea why.

"We haven't done anything differently."

When the first brand (Brand 1) noticed its conversion rate slipping, it hired a well-known CRO agency to help get things on track. Their approach was to measure the brand's website against "proven" best practices and identify improvement opportunities. After the brand did a bit of internal testing, they implemented 85% of the recommendations. Soon after, their conversion problem got even worse.

The other brand's (Brand 2) sales are down 40% from two years ago. They haven't made a heroic effort to improve their position but have experimented with small content changes on the website and different paid marketing campaigns, neither of which have had much impact.

Taking a Closer Look

Looking back, there was a time when our approach to working with either of these brands would have been the same, much like the CRO agency mentioned earlier. We'd come in with our checklist of best practices, identify what aspects of their website fall short, and make recommendations.

While this process helped uncover some key improvement areas for clients years ago, we’ve learned that this may be a good starting point but you can't treat every e-commerce website the same. And there’s always more to the story.

When you dig deeper, these two brands are quite unique, which makes the challenges they're facing different, too.

• Both brands were started by founders with a passion to serve a gap in the market.
• Brand 1 focuses on science-backed products that promote health and safety, while Brand 2 is all about quality, innovation, and style.
• Brand 1 targets an older, health-conscious demographic looking for a safer alternative, while Brand 2's end customers don't buy from them; the technicians and salons they visit do.
• Brand 1 has few competitors who do what they do, while Brand 2 is continually up against newer, cheaper alternatives.
• Brand 1 relies heavily on paid ads and email marketing, while Brand 2 initially grew through organic social and training programs.

The list goes on, but I'm sure you get the idea.

Customer-First

Whether we work with either of these brands, our first step would be a deep dive into the brand, getting to know their customers, how the brand's products fit into their lives, and what other alternatives are competing for attention. Depending on how well the brand knows its customers, we may conduct Zoom interviews and surveys to gather more insight.

From there, we focus on getting a full view of their current customer journey and website performance. It’s important to establish a baseline of where things stand today, understanding what's working and not working. Yes, what's working.

Despite falling conversion, both of these brands are still selling products. We want to make sure we uncover anything that customers find helpful before we make changes. Sometimes we're surprised by what we find—like the power of an infographic that may not look great but is incredibly effective in explaining a product's benefits and driving customers to purchase.

Once we have a good baseline in place, we start setting goals and defining micro-conversions. These are all the baby steps a customer takes before our primary conversion point, which is most likely completing checkout.

A micro-conversion may be starting a product customization flow or simply clicking Add to Cart. Understanding and tracking these can tell us a lot about how customers navigate the website and where they experience friction.

These initial steps help us narrow in on the highest-value opportunities while identifying low-hanging fruit fixes that can be done first. In many cases, the website acts as a foundation for the brand, so ensuring it is solid before investing more resources is a good idea.

For instance, Brand 1 mentioned a past issue with a tracking pixel, leading them to reduce marketing spend—when the strategy they had in place was actually working. We'd want to be sure this is no longer an issue. Brand 2 has site speed and glaring UX issues. Once we've got those fixes in motion, experimenting with targeted landing pages might be the place to start for Brand 1, while improving SEO and redesigning key shopping pages may be right for Brand 2.

Depending on the engagement, we may work together monthly, checking in on performance and continuing to learn and improve the experience. For others, we'll create a roadmap and work in sprints to roll out our key initiatives.

Willow: A Case Study

We took the latter approach recently for a former Barrel client, Willow, who reached out looking for help improving conversion and their overall e-commerce experience.

In 2018, Willow changed the game for nursing moms with the first-ever wireless, hands-free wearable breast pump. Designed for convenience, it allows moms to pump discreetly, no matter where they are. Their latest model syncs with a companion app, offering tools that help moms track everything from pump sessions to milk volume.

We started our engagement with a comprehensive e-commerce audit, analyzing everything from performance metrics to the customer journey and technical setup—resulting in 100 pages of insights.

Based on our findings, we put together a two-phase roadmap. The first phase involved consolidating their headless ContentStack setup into Shopify and redesigning critical e-commerce pages. We focused on creating a more integrated and informed shopping experience while helping Willow get the most out of the Shopify ecosystem.

Our work is continually shifting in this direction. We still see website redesigns, but more often, the brands we talk to are selling on multiple channels and looking for help improving what they have. It’s energizing to take a customer-first approach to these challenges and help these brands create more connected commerce experiences.

Thought

What have I learned about my customers' needs and behaviors recently, and how can I use this understanding to better serve them?