Case Study: Ecommerce CRO Strategy Creates €1M Growth Opportunity for Loop Earplugs

About Loop Earplugs

A growing business with a comparatively small marketing team, Loop Earplugs founder Dimitri O reached out to Swanky for help to grow their ecommerce sales.

Combining comfort and protection for your ears, Loop Earplugs leverage acoustic technology to give users control over what they do and don’t hear. Utilising dual filtration, Loop Pro technology achieves flat attenuation, whereby both high and lower frequency noise is reduced to provide a comfortable balance for day to day wear.

This specialised technology has helped Loop stand out as a brand with a high quality product, lots of happy customers and good brand awareness in several markets. As a result, they were perfectly positioned to join the Swanky Growth Accelerator program.

In 2021, work on their ecommerce growth began with a conversion rate optimisation (CRO) project leveraging on-site A/B testing.

Why conversion rate optimisation?

The Swanky Growth Accelerator program is a strategic selection of activities tailored for each business. In this case, CRO was the obvious starting place, as the team identified several areas of improvement that could be quickly and effectively tested. The Swanky ecommerce CRO experts prioritised the low-hanging fruit first to provide tangible results quickly and kick-off the growth journey.

For Loop Earplugs, there was a clear opportunity to help users find the product they need more quickly and easily. By optimising landing pages, adding in a useful quiz and personalised recommendations, users were quickly able to identify the right product for them.

Understanding the audience

It became clear that demographic-based personas consisting entirely of traditional data such as age, profession and income bracket wouldn’t be the most useful way to think about the needs of the target audience. After all, each search for a product starts with the need for a solution or to overcome a challenge. The problem in this instance is the reduction of noise brought about by any number of real-life situations.

The Swanky team observed that users were coming to the site through a number of situational landing pages and using search terms such as “ear plugs for DIY” or “ear plugs for parenting”. These pages weren’t fully optimised and didn’t meet the needs of the user in their discovery phase.

Further research into user behaviour found conversion rates on these situational landing pages didn’t measure up to the site average, which meant there was opportunity to deliver not only an improved user experience, but a meaningful uplift in conversion rate.

Test 1: Landing page optimisation

The first test focused on optimising the layout of the landing pages so that users could more easily understand the product and why it met their needs. The Swanky team designed a treatment that elevated the profile of the crucial information required in the decision to purchase, such as a price, product variant information and call to action.

The variant was deployed against the control version to a small percentage of the site’s users. It reduced the number of pages a user viewed prior to purchase, and significantly increased the volume of transactions.

This resulted in a 6.4% uplift in transaction revenue, which if rolled out to 100% of the site traffic would produce additional revenue in excess of 17% of UK annual turnover.

Test 2: Connecting users with different product models

The second test focused on connecting the user’s situational challenge with the right product model for them. As with any complex product, the language can be technical and the product features not easily expressed. In a user survey, feedback about the difficulties in selecting the right model, avoiding disappointment, and wishing there was clearer comparison between the options were common themes. Users weren’t clear on how to select the right model for their application.

So, rather than expecting users to discover all the information required to make an informed choice, the Swanky team decided to try something different; a quiz. This ingenious idea utilised quiz app, Quiz Kit, that asked users questions about their situation and produced a tailored product recommendation at the end.

The aim was to reduce the time to purchase by giving users a quick and easy way of finding the right model for them and being confident in their choice. By employing a ‘help me choose’ mechanism in the main navigation, users in the variant flow were able to take advantage of the guided product selector to get to the appropriate page much faster than if they were undertaking a manual product comparison.

The test produced a 2.7% uplift in conversions overall, with the impact most prominently felt in the desktop user group at 4.5% uplift. New users were much more likely to be impacted as expected, and this group saw a 5.9% uplift in conversions.

The final results show that if this solution were to be rolled out to 100% of the site traffic, it would produce additional revenue in excess of 2% of UK annual turnover.

There were considerable additional gains to this test, primarily in gathering valuable zero-party data from users. It meant Swanky was able to enrich the Loop Earplugs customer database with information about the customer use cases, and therefore personalise email marketing to each particular individual in the future.

Up next: Focus on reviews by user situation

As you may imagine from the story so far, it’s clear that users are driven by their situational challenges and the problem they are trying to solve. It stands to reason that providing reviews from users who have been in a similar situation would further enhance the product’s credibility to do the job. And if you find yourself on the Loop Earplugs site sometime soon, you may just end up being part of a testing group.

How can Swanky help your growth ambitions?

If you’ve read to the end of this article, you’re probably intrigued about whether or not Swanky can do the same for you. Our Growth Accelerator Program is a strategic selection of activities tailored for each business we work with, and the first thing we need to do is chat about your ambitions and challenges.

So let’s talk.