California Beauty Brand Earned an Extra $120K+ a Year
Dermaclara, a California-based beauty brand known for its FDA-registered silicone patches, had no trouble bringing in traffic — but converting those visitors into customers was a challenge. After a series of strategic homepage and mobile menu optimizations, we helped the brand shift from over-educating to selling. The result? A 5.59% lift in conversions, 132 additional transactions, and an annual revenue increase of over $120,000, all driven by smart, low-cost CRO tweaks.
Here’s how we earned a California beauty brand an extra $120K+ a year
Below, you’ll learn how we investigated the add-to-cart challenges bedeviling a beloved California beauty brand — and you’ll discover how, after a period of rigorous experimentation, we advised its leadership on straightforward changes to their online store resulting in six-figure gains in its annual revenue.
If you’d like to see similar wins for your business, let us know — we’ll increase your conversion rate by 10% in 60 days, or we’ll work for free until we do.
Dermaclara is a San Diego, California-based beauty and wellness brand with a holy grail set of products: best-in-class medical-grade silicone patches scientifically proven to reduce the appearance of fine lines, scars, and blemishes. Thanks to the strong storytelling around its products and an impressive influencer network led by founder Ashley King, the brand had captured significant word-of-mouth — but while these two factors could compel new users to visit the Dermaclara website, they weren’t enough to make the sale.
That’s where we came in, with a series of highly targeted experiments to uncover why buyers weren’t pulling out their credit cards — despite the brand’s success raising awareness of its virtues and backing up its claims with ample scientific evidence.
Here, we’ll go through the changes we made, which showed results so quickly that they even surprised us — raking in an extra $5,000 within the first 20 days of the test.
Starting points
The biggest challenge for a beauty or wellness brand is credibility: Can it really do what it promises on the label? For many brands in Dermaclara’s category, the biggest stumbling block is simple credibility: Does it perform as advertised? There’s no question more important in the realm of anti-aging products. Most can’t substantiate their claims for an audience that is ever-more suspicious of pie-in-the-sky claims, which — thanks to the profusion of online experts (both self-professed and actual) — are more than ever subject to intense scrutiny. Woe betide the brand that falls afoul of an audience that is primed for activism on behalf of its community — and ready to call out brands that come up short.
Dermaclara’s problem, though, was different. The brand had no trouble bringing shoppers to its site, thanks to a network of brand evangelists led from the top down by co-founder Ashley King, whose official title is executive brand ambassador. Dermaclara does one thing, broadly defined, and does it better than anyone: It produces medical-grade silicone patches meant to reduce the appearance of fine lines, scars, and blemishes. Outside of certain sets, most of its products target a specific area, whether the forehead, neck, or eyes and mouth. And these products have been extensively tested, by industry leaders (BioScreen® Testing Services), with their credentials (registration with the FDA and DEA) prominently advertised. So what was the problem?
I: Real Estate
It all begins with the homepage. We knew Dermaclara’s product pages were working well enough — many of the visitors landing there, via search for products they were already primed to buy, did, in fact, convert. Job well done.
We soon saw, though, that the homepage represented a missed opportunity. These curious would-be shoppers weren’t being sold on the products — and we intuited that it had less to do with either their efficacy or the storytelling around them than it did with the simple mechanics of the homepage.
No real estate on this page is as valuable as what’s viewable on first contact: the area above the fold. Here, though, we saw the brand still in storytelling mode, with a module devoted to helping users better understand their “anti-aging and stretch mark products.” It was a simple case of the brand continuing to do what it already did best: educating its community on the efficacy of its products. In this case, though, it came at the expense of sales. Education has its virtues, especially in a niche where false and exaggerated claims are often viewed as a necessary evil. Dermaclara was understandably keen to ensure that its community of buyers understood that their claims were, in fact, wholly accurate and scientifically valid — but at the cost of allowing consumers to finish learning about their products and graduate to buying. In this case, we had too much of a good thing.
They increased daily revenue by $2-3K, resulting in an additional $700k+ yearly to the bottom line. The learnings in regards to our customers was priceless. Absolutely delivered on time, perfect timing quite frankly for us to be able to maximize on BF/CM resulting a big win for the brand. They understood our needs, and then used their expertise to build, and we trusted, and that worked!"
II. Our strategy
We like to say that conversion rate optimization is the marketing strategy that permits meaningful change with tools already at your disposal. There’s no need to incur ongoing expenses building out an extensive rebrand, convincing influencers to come on board at a reasonable rate, or developing a new SEO strategy that will take months to yield results. CRO is the art of the tweak. We can see what you can’t — and in this case, what we saw was that the brand was over-excelling in one arena — education and verification — at the cost of conversion.
After establishing that product education took place throughout the site (most meaningfully on the product pages themselves), we reasoned that the homepage would be best used for other purposes: to sell. We determined that the optimal strategy would be to replace this educational module with one featuring five of the brand’s most popular products: the forehead patch, the eye and mouth patch, the eyes, mouth, and forehead kit, the eyes, mouth and forehead patches, and the facial rejuvenation kit. We selected these products based on their rates of conversion. We preserved as much of the copy describing the products as possible without taking the spotlight away from them, highlighting in the headline copy that these are “the safest and most effective natural anti-aging and stretch mark treatments available.” (You’ll note the subtle shift from education to promotion.) We expected this change to result in an increase in conversion rates. We were right.
III. Our results
The changes were dramatic and near-immediate. Within 20 days, the brand earned revenue $5,000 in excess of expectations — an increase attributable to our changes. Ultimately we also observed:
Gains of +5.69% in revenue per user
Gains of +5.59% in conversion lift
Gains of 132 extra transactions
Gains of $10,000 above expectations
Ultimately resulting in estimated additional revenue of $120,000 annually.
IV. Diving deeper
We also found during our discovery phase that while the brand’s educational efforts were highly successful in terms of the products themselves, they had been less adept at communicating the advantages of setting up subscriptions for the products. Dermaclara patches are reusable up to 30 times, which may have provided a natural obstacle in spurring subscriptions — why subscribe when this product, unlike so many others, is reusable? Regardless, it seemed clear to us that there was room for improvement here. We redesigned this space to more clearly enunciate the benefits of a subscription package and saw rates of conversion promptly improve.
We also found that while a significant minority of users accessed Dermaclara’s hamburger menu, the menu itself was poorly designed. We put forward a redesign of this tool, privileging clarity and winnowing out an overabundance of options. In addition to making the menu itself clearer and easier to use, we wanted to capitalize on the mobile menu as a liminal space: How could we prod buyers to shop, even as they conducted their own exploration of the space? We added a shoppable widget to the top of the menu itself, encouraging conversion and discovery even as users conducted their own exploration of the site.
We found that all of these improvements enhanced the mobile menu's user experience, leading to increased engagement and ultimately, more conversions.
