The CRO track of BRAUZZ.: Subscriptions and A/B testing
BRAUZZ. is a day 1 partner of ours. After creating a new website for them, they were ready to take things to the next level by implementing a more sophisticated subscriptions setup and starting A/B tests. BRAUZZ. already offered subscriptions before, but with a Shopify native app that had limited options. Because of their rapid growth and the fact that Shopify native subscriptions couldn't handle all European payment methods, we partnered up with Firmhouse for subscriptions. The A/B tests were executed in order to find out how they could best market their subscription model, eventually optimising their conversion rate.
Who is BRAUZZ.?
The Ghentian start-up BRAUZZ. sells ecological cleaning products. Recently, they’ve even won multiple sustainability awards for their products! Founders Lowie Vercraeye, Ruben Renaer and Manush Barvar started their e-commerce business in 2020 and launched their very first product in 2021. In only one year, they managed to scale up their monthly revenue from 10.000 euros to 100.000 euros.
Now they sell a broad range of products, from toilet cleaners to laundry detergents and even dishwasher tablets. But, to improve their sales, they also wanted to offer subscriptions, which is a challenge to do in Shopify.
New website creation
Based on the design of another design agency, we created a new website for BRAUZZ.. Although we didn’t make the actual design, we helped BRAUZZ to guide the process and make decisions.
Further, we added some fun extras like built-in reviews and videos on the product pages. So feel free to check it out yourself.
CRO with A/B testing
We like to work closely with our clients to continuously improve the website. Thanks to the fast-paced nature of e-commerce, there are always things to optimise. This allows us to quickly jump on trends that improve the website.
After the initial website set-up, we started A/B testing lots of stuff for BRAUZZ. It's a great tool that allows them to allocate money on things that actually work.
One of the first things we A/B tested was testing how different shipping fees and different free shipping thresholds had an impact on conversion rate and revenue. This we did with the Shopify app ShipScout which allows merchants to quickly and easily set-up A/B testing related to their shipping fees.
As BRAUZZ. is offering a subscription service, the next thing they wanted to test was how we could push more people to a subscription without it feeling pushy AND without decreasing overall conversion rates on other products.
To find this fine line to just be pushy enough without annoying people, we set up 3 variants, each one increasing the “in-your-face” factor. By monitoring multiple metrics we could get a good feel on how the client feels about the different messages we were pushing. For instance, we were analysing the overall conversion rate at a high level, whilst also focusing on the conversion rate for subscriptions. Additionally, we tracked customer behaviour in response to encountering pop-ups. Were they switching to a subscription like the pop-up prompted them to do, or did they find this pop-up to be annoying and were they leaving the site?
Another interesting fact is that VWO allows us to view this data related to specific devices. It can for example occur that a pop-up works on desktop but not on mobile. By filtering the data, we can really personalise the experience based on different metrics to maximise the increase of UX and CR.
In the end we almost tripled the conversion rate specific to subscriptions - 0.61% to 1.79% in the winning variant. We also increased the overall conversion rate, taking into account subscription orders as well as one-off orders, by 0.5%!
After implementing the winning variant, we used GA4 and GTM to continue monitoring the performance of the pop-up, making sure the pop-up isn’t bothering a lot of people. We do this by checking how many people actually perform the action we want them to take on the pop-up - switching to a subscription using the button on the pop-up. If we see the click rate of that button falling, we can simply disable the pop-up. In short, CRO testing with VWO allows us to safely test ideas to continuously improve the website.
Subscriptions in Shopify
BRAUZZ. offers their products on a subscription basis. As we’ve mentioned in a previous article, it is easy to add subscriptions to your Shopify store - and we encourage testing subscriptions out using these tools - but if you want to grow in the multimillion European subscription market, it might make sense to check out other services. Like Firmhouse for example, because they allow using local payment methods.
This can drive your conversion rate up because people have more options to pay with next to using either a credit card or a Paypal account.
Every time you check out for a subscription in BRAUZZ., you will be redirected to Firmhouse. We built the connection between Firmhouse and Shopify by writing a custom application for BRAUZZ..
Partnership with Firmhouse
For this client (and others) we teamed up with Firmhouse. Firmhouse is a platform that enables you to offer your product subscriptions in the blink of an eye. Fully stand-alone or connected to your existing website or e-commerce store.
It provides a better solution for subscription based e-commerce businesses and together with some of our own coding, we created the best subscription version for BRAUZZ..
Do you have the same problem(s)? Drop us a line and we’re happy to help!
