Home Fitness Brand Adds $1.35 Million in Annualized Revenue With a 14% Conversion Boost
Lifepro Fitness, a home fitness brand with strong traffic but poor conversions, partnered with our team to overhaul their ecommerce experience. Through a blend of site speed optimization, UX improvements, and strategic A/B testing, we delivered a 14% boost in conversion rate, a 47% increase in Add to Cart actions, and an annualized revenue lift of $1.35 million. The results prove that even high-traffic sites need a refined conversion strategy to unlock their true revenue potential.
Lifepro Fitness is a New Jersey-based home fitness brand born of unenviable circumstances: Friends Joel Gottherer and Abraham Branch suffered ACL injuries within months of each other. Such injuries require intensive rehab — and Gottherer, with over a decade’s experience as a personal trainer and within the wider fitness industry, was dismayed to discover a paucity of options for thoughtful, community-minded care: “They continued to find themselves disappointed with the results stemming from various products promising to relieve their pain, and with that, Lifepro Fitness was born.”
The pair has since developed a best-in-class coterie of home fitness equipment, including their signature vibration plates, which is sold alongside other rehab-minded products, like sauna blankets (and saunas), red light therapy equipment, massagers and ice baths. Fitness and strength-training gear, like treadmills and adjustable dumbbells, round out their product offering.
Below, you’ll find our systematic approach to improving their conversion rate, which resulted in an increased annualized revenue of $1.35 million and a 47% boost to the brand’s add-to-cart value.
Challenges
With a great story, deep motivation, and strong press notice from top-ranked editorial outlets like Forbes, GQ, and Entrepreneur, Lifepro Fitness had its product selection, mission, and messaging on lock. With over 100,000 visitors per month, why weren’t they selling more?
In analyzing their site, we discovered that though buyers had a high degree of affinity for their purchases, newcomers to the site encountered a non-optimized shopping environment. The product description pages were cluttered with a surfeit of calls-to-action. The pricing structures were confusing. No valuable product information was viewable above the fold.
Our Ambitions
Conversion rate optimization proves that even a superior product can be hampered by a poor ecommerce experience — and we knew that by streamlining the shopping experience, we could radically transform Lifepro Fitness’s conversion rates.
Following a quarantine-induced boom, during which monthly revenue doubled, Lifepro’s conversion rates had dwindled for the past year, and partnering with top advertising agencies had failed to move the needle — even as traffic topped out at around 150,000 visitors per month, very poor conversion rates (~0.5-2%, and up to ~3% during holiday or sale periods) meant that traffic was being wasted.
The website had never been optimized for conversion, meaning there was a lot of work to be done — but also a ton of room for improvement.
Our targets: We believed site speed was a major contributor to the poor conversion rate. The conversion funnel also showed a significant disparity between people viewing products and those who ultimately added them to their cart, compared to the industry average.
Here’s how we proceeded:
To optimize the ecommerce conversion funnel:
- Site redesign
- PDP redesign
- A/B testing against original to validate successful changes
To increase conversions:
- Moved valuable information above the fold
To increase revenue:
- Sticky banner added with Add to Cart button
To improve site speed:
- Upgraded site to Shopify 2.0 Booster Theme
- Modernization of the design
To optimize user experience:
- Deployment and analysis of heat maps, scroll maps, and click maps
- Conducted usability testing, customer exit and post-conversion surveys, and customer support questionnaire
- Analyzed conversion funnel drop-off
- Used industry benchmarking to identify user pain points
- Ensured that the new site would be ADA compliant
A systematic approach improved the conversion rate, which resulted in an increased annualized revenue of $1.35 million and a 47% boost to the brand’s add-to-cart value.
Focusing on User Experience to Transform Conversion
Addressing Lifepro Fitness’s issue meant a careful examination of buyer psychology — and what we found was an online retail experience that they found frustrating and challenging. This ultimately dissuaded them from purchasing a product that they were confident would meaningful improve their health and fitness — a testament to the power of frustration, and how it can trump even the best product development, media notice, and peer reviews — to say nothing of the tremendous resources expended to support Lifepro Fitness’s paid ad campaigns. They were doing everything right to bring traffic — the right kind of traffic — to their site. But, as we discovered, the site itself was the problem.
To better understand the situation, we analyzed heat maps tracking user behavior on the brand’s product description pages — and what we found bore out our gut sense that in an effort to help its community make the best possible decisions in support of their fitness, Lifepro Fitness was drowning them in information — and the chief peril of too much communication is that nothing meaningful is communicated. Complexity had overtaken clarity — and the brand’s mission, and its products value, had been lost in the process.
We performed a comprehensive competitive industry analysis, identifying top performers in the field and determining which wins could be extrapolated on our client’s behalf; we analyzed industry trends and benchmarks to identify shortcomings and areas for improvement. We aimed for simplicity and elegance. Thumbnail images were moved to the left, giving more space above the fold for the most critical details about the products, which had previously been hidden below it. A sticky header with an Add To Cart button, along with the use of breadcrumbs, gave buyers the opportunity to take action at any point throughout their customer journey. Prices — which previously featured multiple iterations of discounting — was simplified. Only one price (and at most a single discount) was shown, both increasing clarity and decreasing the potential for unfairly cheapening the product by making it seem overly discounted.
These changes were accompanied by revisions to the home page and within the site’s navigation. The navigation was both streamlined and reorganized: We’ve seen in many instances how crucial user self-identification is to the user experience and buying journey. Here, that element was missing, forcing would-be buyers to engage in some serious, time-consuming searching on the site — a huge roadblock. For their new design, we gave users two ways to self-identify: by their personal identity — did they see themselves as focusing on recovery, wellness, strength, endurance, etc — or by personal need (in which case they would focus on the specific product type, rather than the more nebulous identity type, which required more assistance in translating their needs to possible purchases.)
Our research showed that understanding the Lifepro customer’s needs on a granular level would allow us to focus on what they really wanted: not all the information, but just enough. Not all the pricing iterations, but the most relevant. Putting this information into action, we were able to radically shift Lifepro’s conversion success, to the tune of over a million dollars in annualized revenue.
By the Numbers
- Increased conversion rate +14%
- Increased Add to Cart by 47%
- Increased Revenue per Visit by $0.77
- Annualized Revenue Increase of +$1.35 Million
- Site Speed (Desktop): Increased by 259%
- Site Speed (Mobile): Increased by 309%
