In 2004, wine connoisseur, Neil Monnens, noticed a funny thing about wine – there was no consistency in price across wines with the same ratings. In late 2004, he started publishing WineBlueBook each month to provide a simple wine buying guide that offers an at-a-glance breakdown of how one wine compares to another in terms of quality and price.  WineBlueBook’s goal is to make wine drinking and wine buying more accessible to everyone by helping consumers find quality wines at every price point.

Client Challenge

WineBlueBook’s goal is to signup website visitors to a free trial of its monthly publication. The goal is to show visitors the value of the product and then subsequently sign them up to a paid subscription.

WineBlueBook’s site had undergone extensive search engine optimization (SEO) efforts which were yielding significant levels of highly targeted organic search traffic each month. However, while the organic traffic levels continued to grow, the program was generating very few trials.

In addition to SEO, WineBlueBook launched a paid search campaign on Google to drive traffic but the campaign also yielded very few trials.

Thrivepoint Solution

Thrivepoint conducted an extensive analysis of WineBlueBook’s website usability, organic traffic and keywords to determine where the conversion funnel was breaking. Thrivepoint quickly discovered that the primary cause of poor performance was rooted in the fact that 9 out of 10 visitors were leaving the site less than 30 seconds after arriving.

To engage consumers with WineBlueBook, Thrivepoint implemented Thrivepoint Engage™ – a solution to improve the messaging and layout of the web pages in order to capture more trial signups. Optimization was focused on three pages as a proof of concept.

The focus of optimization was on message, layout and offer testing to determine if consumers viewed WineBlueBook as a way to save money on wine or as a way to discover new wines to try. The testing of messages and layouts were implemented to determine which core theme was going to drive the highest trial rate.

Through the course of the program, Thrivepoint implemented and tested three web page layouts, two core messages and three offer treatments. Test messaging was deployed as eight executions rolled out into matched pairs to determine if “Savings” or “Discovery” messages were the primary motivators for trials. After the test yielded that consumers were more motivated by the “Savings” messages, the test was further focused on drilling down into which specific “Savings” message maximized trial rate.

Campaign Results

The program yielded an overall increase in site wide trials of 192% in two months driven by an increase in signup rate by 103% and increasing organic traffic.

For the three pages targeted specifically for optimization, the results were even better. A key finding in the initial analysis was that visitors were not engaged. Decreasing bounce rate by 6 percentage points increased conversion rate and enabled home page optimization which yielded 776% more trials than months prior to the program. The other pages targeted for optimization yielded a 950% increase in trials.

In addition, all optimizations were handled with care to ensure that no flow of organic traffic was interrupted and pages were further optimized for organic search in cases where it was warranted. The net result was a 22% increase in traffic for the targeted pages.

Read more Case Studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Halé Bob, a Los Angeles-based clothing company globally known for its unique style and celebrity clientele, employs its website as a key strategy in servicing its global client base, but the website itself was not producing the desired customer relationships or revenue impact. Some factors included: declining revenue during 2008-09 recession; most people leave the site without engaging; Poor performance from online marketing.

Thrivepoint Solution

Thrivepoint implemented Thrivepoint Engage™ – its proven marketing optimization solution – to:

• Completely map the conversion funnel and identify new engagement opportunities;
• Engineer design and message test to increase sales and signups while decreasing abandonment;
• Align online media, paid search and social media with the new strategy;
• Implement SEO on each page to increase organic traffic.

Implementation

Through the conversion funnel analysis, Thrivepoint established that repeat visitors were exponentially more likely to purchase and first-time purchases required a high frequency approach. Halé Bob’s current approach emphasized high reach and low frequency. Thrivepoint recommended implementing a conversion funnel that emphasized first time visitors signing up for remarketing programs that would provide them fashion exclusives and discounts on merchandise. Remarketing was defined as signing up for email, following Halé Bob’s Twitter profile or becoming a fan of Halé Bob on Facebook and the goal was to use these cost effective remarketing programs as the primary channel to introduce the higher frequency needed to turn one time visitors into repeat visitors and then customers.

With this strategy in place, Thrivepoint implemented website optimization consisting of offer, design, message and content testing on key website entry points — i.e., high traffic web pages — to maximize sales and signups to the remarketing programs. Through the course of website optimization, Thrivepoint also implemented search engine optimization by using proven messaging and content from the testing programs. Finally, the improved conversion flow and messaging were integrated with the paid advertising campaigns to ensure that ROI from paid media was maximized.

Campaign Results

The campaign has been a big success!  Declining revenue trends have been reversed and the channel is growing again.

Due to conversion optimization focused on the engagement model and conversion funnel, engagement rate from advertising increased 15x and overall site-wide engagement rate increased 851%.

Due to the improved conversion funnel and website usability, online advertising effectiveness increased allowing spend to grow by 3x which delivered an absolute increase in the size of the remarketing prospect database of 60% in just four months. Revved up remarketing efforts increased the quality and frequency of visitors to the site which contributed to higher visit to sales conversion rates and revenue. As a result, visit to sale conversion rate increased by 124% because visitors were introduced to remarketing programs and encouraged to come back to the site, which ensured that the quality of traffic to the site was continually increasing.

Thrivepoint continues to work with Halé Bob to optimize its marketing programs, website and search engine optimization.

Read more Case Studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Challenge: Thrivepoint was hired by Uplifting Athletes in June-2008 to help generate donations for an upcoming event at Penn State and to help launch the Ohio State chapter. Uplifiting Athletes had created a Google Adwords campaign with a Google Grant that was inactive due to poor Quality Scores. With the key events coming in July, Uplifting Athletes was under a looming deadline to generate awareness of the pledge drive and donations before and during the events. The situation was especially urgent given that the events only take place once per year ahead of football season.

Solution: Thrivepoint created a three-pronged strategy focused on achieving the following goals:

• Re-organize the account to immediately increase quality score and get the campaign live;
• Optimize Google Adwords creative, create new adgroups, and expand keyword lists to increase volume;
• Integrate social media to amplify the results of the campaign across the college campuses.

Implementation: On day one, Thrivepoint’s goal was to get the campaign live and generating traffic by end of day. Upon starting work, Thrivepoint discovered that the root cause of the low Quality Score was that keywords were bundled in one ad group with just one creative. A best practice for increasing Quality Score is to segment keywords into specific groupings with similar concepts and to launch at least two creatives in each AdGroup so that Google’s auto-optimization algorithm may select the best performing creative. Thrivepoint set to work segmenting the campaign’s existing assets into groups that would have a high enough Quality Score to go live. By afternoon, the campaign was live and generating visits to the website.

With the campaign live, the focus shifted to increasing volume and pledges for the donation drive. The campaign started with less than 20 keywords and just one creative. Thrivepoint expanded the number of keywords to 1,200+ across eight different segments. Thrivepoint also created a test matrix and wrote 50+ new creatives across the eight segments (~6 test creatives for each ad group) in order to maximize the learning and performance of the campaign.

Given that college campuses have been early adopters of social networks, Thrivepoint diverted portions of the campaign traffic from the uplifting athletes website to social networks so that results may be amplified by the supporters of the cause. To implement this approach, a portion of campaign traffic was diverted to Facebook to allow people to donate via Facebook Causes and to ‘Become a Fan’ of the Uplifting Athletes group. The goal was to encourage participation by users so that messages would be published in their Friend Feed to people’s social circle.

Part of the campaign was also diverted to YouTube for users to watch Uplifting Athletes videos and to encourage users to embed the videos on their blogs and social networks to share with their audience.

Results: Within just a few days, the campaign went from not live due to Quality Score to generating traffic to generating viral response. The end result of the pledge drives was a success with Penn State giving more than $75,000 to Kidney Cancer research. The Ohio State launch was also a success with more than 60 student-athletes pledging their support and participation in generating donations for Kidney Cancer research. The results were accomplished in less than 4-weeks time from start to finish.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free needs assessment, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.