Success Story
Best Friends by Sheri: Shopify Conversion Rate from 0.54% to 4.25%
We lifted a US pet-bed brand's Shopify conversion rate from 0.54% to 4.25% (about 8x), with total revenue up 524% and ROAS up 250%.
Reading time: 2 mins · Published
The challenge
Best Friends by Sheri already sold successfully through Amazon and wholesale. Its own Shopify store, built by a boutique agency, looked good but ignored conversion best practice, and it converted at just 0.54%. On Facebook, the brand had no prospecting strategy that could cut through heavy competition in the pet category. Then COVID-19 hit: sales slowed in February and March, lockdown closed the shipping area, and best-sellers were hard to keep in stock.
What we did
Facebook Ads
- Once fulfilment was confirmed to be operating, we launched a sale campaign for clearance products to clear excess stock without losing profit.
- We added a retargeting campaign with a small 10%-off code, the first promo code the brand had used. It produced over 7x higher ROAS that month.
- We cut almost three minutes of footage from a Hallmark Channel morning-show segment that featured the brand’s best-selling bed. It became one of our best-performing creatives, because third-party social proof matters in a market full of low-quality copies.
- An Easter campaign for a bed with bunny ears became one of the top five performers.
Facebook and Instagram ads running in spring 2020.
Conversion rate optimisation, in five phases
- Theme upgrade and custom development. We moved to the latest major theme version and built cross-product linking where Shopify’s option selectors fell short.
- Navigation and homepage. We dropped the generic menu links and led with “Shop Dogs” and “Shop Cats” collections. The homepage slider became a single static hero for the best-seller, with the top three collections above the fold.
- Product and cart pages. Key features were made scannable, shipping and refunds went into tabs, photo reviews were shown first, review ratings appeared next to product titles, Amazon reviews were imported, and calls to action got a high-contrast colour.
- Post-purchase upsells and pre-orders. One-click post-purchase upsells added over $20K of purely incremental revenue in under three months. A pre-orders app kept sales going through COVID stock-outs and accounted for over 15% of 2020 sales.
- Speed and ongoing testing. We cut image weight by over 30% on average and deferred non-essential scripts, then moved to a testing-based programme.
Results
Google Analytics: revenue and ecommerce conversion rate, early 2019 to May 2020.
- Conversion rate from 0.54% to 4.25%, about 8x, with record store revenue in April 2020
- Revenue 50x higher in the last three months than in the first three
- Total revenue +524% and ROAS +250%
- Results held through the COVID-19 outbreak without cutting ad spend
Feedback
As we speak we are now exceeding 5% Conversion Rate! It's all thanks to the team. We couldn't do it without them. I consider them more than just a service provider, I consider them as part of my eCommerce team.