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168% Increase In Revenue Per Customer (RPV) For YLighting

"We learned something counterintuitive that we never would have known without testing, and were able to thread it through the business all the way down to our print advertising," says Jeff Zwelling CEO of YLighting, an online merchant that sells contemporary lighting solutions. "That's pretty compelling from a business sense."

By testing and optimizing landing pages, Zwelling and his team were able to improve conversions (from visitors to buyers) by 58% and revenue per customer by 168%. Here's how:

PROBLEM:

YLighting did a great job optimizing its keyword buys for specific two-word phrases such as "modern lighting" or "track lighting": In most cases, they were in the top of free search and paid results for key terms. They were also successful at converting those visitors into profitable customers.

The problem was with more general search terms like "lighting." Zwelling knew that many people searching under those general terms would find his offerings relevant if they took the time to look around, but Web analytics told him he was losing people right off the landing page. "Unless I could communicate to those visitors that we were relevant to them as soon as they landed, they were out of there and we never saw them again."

Some of his visitors, such as home owners and restaurant owners, are often far beyond college age. They may want contemporary lighting but don't know that they should search for that specific term. The answer was a customized landing page geared directly toward those types of searchers who searched under broader keywords.

Zwelling focused on the keywords "pendant lighting" -- not as broad, perhaps, as "lighting fixture," but searched for more often than "contemporary lighting." It was a phrase he felt should have converted well -- but it wasn't working.

First, he tested a landing page with banners flashing, "$20 off!" That failed.

Then he tested a page that showed the apartment from the TV show "The Apprentice," with price tags on every lamp in the apartment (which YLighting just happened to sell). That didn't work, either.

"We couldn't tell which parts of our informal experiments were affecting what," Zwelling says. "There were too many variables." He needed a way to find out exactly what offer worked best.

SOLUTION:

YLighting turned to Offermatica because it focused on "the ideas and the marketing concepts in particular," Zwelling says, and because technically, it wasn't that difficult to implement.

What he found was that other testing vendors focused more on color and font and the look of the site rather than marketing principles.

For example, he says, people might want to look at "cool stuff" but will actually purchase only the basics. "They'll be attracted to red walls, but they're going to paint their own walls white," he says. "We didn't know if that was true for this segment of people we were going after. Maybe what they wanted to see was just cheap deals." It was this type of marketing message he hoped to test.

Working with Offermatica, Zwelling tested a number of variables:

  • coupon offers
  • styles of lighting
  • offers (value propositions)
  • navigation tools
  • copy

Ultimately, he came up with one winning "recipe."

RESULTS:

The change in conversions was significant: per customer revenue increased by 168% and conversions (from visitors to buyers) improved by 58%.

Zwelling is now working with other findings from the campaign that he thinks will continue to increase revenues:

  • Bullet points work better than long copy (contrary to old-school advertising rules).
  • Certain marketing philosophies Zwelling's team had operated by were proven to be true, so they now implement them more confidently.
  • One particular result was actually counterintuitive; that change was made across the board, making the rest of their advertising more effective.
  • Zwelling was able to take the results to his Creative Director to show him what customers were responding to, which will enable the Director to be even more effective.

Throughout the entire campaign, Zwelling says the Offermatica team "worked through everything with grace and diligence. Technically it's not that hard, and they're a great group of people."