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.

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