Mobile conversions are notoriously lower than desktop ones. And if you’ve hit a plateau and are struggling to increase conversion rate, don’t give up!

ScrubsandBeyond.com is a retail and e-commerce company that was in that very position just 6 months ago—but they eventually increased mobile conversions by 125% overall.

How did we do it? In partnership with the Scrubs and Beyond team, the Melon product design team tossed so-called ‘best practices’ aside and obsessed over their users.

Introducing Scrubs and Beyond

Scrubsandbeyond.com is an online retailer that sells a wide range of scrubs and medical uniforms online. They faced the same issue that most online businesses do—getting mobile traffic to convert.

Since 70% of their traffic comes from mobile devices, they had an urgent issue on their hands.

We used a blend of tools like heat maps, website feedback, and session recordings along with Google Analytics to develop and test hypotheses about what kept visitors from converting. Then they made changes and ran A/B tests to see whether those changes boosted conversions.

In the end, they increased conversion rates across their entire business, which included a 125% increase (!) in mobile conversions.

Refusing to blindly follow ‘best practices’

Many companies try to increase conversions by blindly implementing best practices they’ve read about online.

The trouble with best practices is that they’re always based on another company’s experience. In other words, what works for Amazon may not (and probably won’t) work for everyone else. Also, best practice is by definition ‘past’ practice—something that worked well enough twelve months ago and made it to the list of best practices is possibly no longer as effective right now.

Relying solely on best practices was not enough to move the needle. Scrubs and Beyonds customers are unique, as are their products and business model—so they needed to go back to the core issues and needs that people had when visiting ScrubsandBeyond.com and use insight from their research to optimize mobile conversion rates.

Bringing out the Best of the Scrubs and Beyond Brand

Most (especially averaged or aggregate) customer research does not generate real insights! it creates boring brands that are copy cats of each other.

And the bottom line? The brands, the products, the services are commoditized. It’s an absolute race to the bottom.

The Hypothesis:

More mobile customers are likely buying for themselves or small groups.
Mobile customers therefore just need an easier way to get through checkout.

Based on user persona research, Scrubs and Beyond had reason to believe that there was 2 basic types of buyers and that they had different needs and different ways of purchasing. The data showed that the larger orders (likely for a medical office or hospitals) were done more on desktop and that the mobile orders were likely users buying for themselves. The mobile buyers were These people likely didn’t understand the difference between sizes or styles, and there were gaps in what they needed to know to make an informed, confident decision.

They hypothesized that the breakthrough in the buyer’s journey would come by reducing steps in checkout on mobile and prioritizing express checkout options. This included reducing clutter on the site overall. Understanding what the priorities of different buyers was an important aspect in not trying to be everything to everyone on every page.

Conversion Rate Optimization - CRO - Our steps to understanding what prevents mobile visitors from converting

Before spending time, effort, and money on final website changes, good CRO requires us to develop and test our hypotheses. Here are the steps ScrubsandBeyond.com and the Melon product design team took to understand the problem and come up with a data-driven action plan.

Reviewing analytics data and creating custom dashboards in Google Data Studio

Web analytics tools show traffic data in aggregate, including which pages users visit more often, where the traffic came from, and where people left the site. They went to Google Analytics to observe the big picture and look for red flags. The melon product design team built a google data studio to have a single source to share and process their findings.

We look at data at individual user sessions and individual orders and look at patterns that the aggregate data doesn’t usually show. In particular, during our investigation, we created pages to isolate particular user patterns to help determine who needed what. We looked at order size and the user session behavior of large order versus smaller orders to discover the breakpoint.

Although the % of sessions with search is lower it is somewhat causational and we can tell that by the search terms. Users looking for something specific use search and even use item numbers, their purchase intent is much higher than those who are just browsing. For example a user searching for “purple scrubs” even is looking for something particular within a range. If they are searching for color + brand + item name and you have that product if it’s easy to buy your odds or conversion are exponentially higher.

The data visualization helped the team to prioritize what features were important and which were not. Often the basics like search get overlooked as a priority and especially the instinct is to look for something “new”. This process requires critical thinking on behalf of the team to look at the data in a fairly granular way and ask the right questions. These types of insights do not appear in top level aggregate reporting.

The yellow mobile revenue grew and optimized over time

Bringing all the data and user research together

After learning and taking all the steps above, the team identified the following barriers to conversion:

Mobile Visitors were shopping and even adding to cart but the largest abandonment was in cart and check out
There were also indicators that the Product Page (PDP) also needed to be improved as part of conversion improvement.

Making (and testing) the changes

Based on the insights gained from the research, the team of developers and designers worked together to make and test significant changes.

What did they actually look like?

Before:

After:

Simplifying & Decluttering the experience produced amazing results.

The Result: A 125% boost in mobile conversions

After testing many different variations, the winner produced a 125% increase in mobile conversion rates for mobile shoppers.

Keep in mind, 70% of ScrubsandBeyond.com’s traffic comes from mobile visitors, so a 125% improvement on conversion rate on mobile traffic is a huge win.

Additional Wins

The team produced some amazing results for mobile conversions, but that wasn’t the only thing they improved. ScrubsandBeyond.com experienced the following improvements:

66% improvement in desktop conversions
52% more visitors have reached the cart
121% increase in new users revenue YOY
21% increase in return users revenue YOY

Scrubs and Beyond proved that prioritizing your user data over one-size-fits-all best practices information produces exponential results.

How to Increase Mobile Conversion Rate - Scrubs and Beyond