What would your profitability look like if you could double or even triple your sales without changing anything else in your growth strategy?

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That would be pretty great right?

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It’s no secret that one of the best ways to improve your profitability across all of your marketing channels is to improve your conversion rate. 

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Obviously if you can earn more revenue off the same effort, you’re going to be in a good place with your CFO.

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Did you know that the average Shopify store converts at 1.5%? For many brands, this creates a massive pinch point and makes it very difficult to scale profitably

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When Minutemen Coffee came to us, they were sitting between a 3 and 4% conversion rate and they were having a hard time scaling with rising ad and product costs.

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In this review, we will break down exactly where the pinch points were and how we corrected them to skyrocket conversions to 7.36%

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As you read on, keep in mind that all conversion rates are relative and what’s unprofitable for one brand may be wildly profitable for another.

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Growth Strategy

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Before anything, we needed to dial in a strategy that would allow us to reach our goals. Contrary to popular belief, there’s a lot more that goes into boosting conversions than just improving the website and landing pages.

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In fact, one of the most important aspects of the conversion strategy is to think about audience quality. Remember, you could send 10,000 unqualified people to an amazing website and have a 0% conversion rate.

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By mapping out a strategy that helped engrain people into the brand, we could improve customer commitment throughout our omnichannel strategy.

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By building a paid ads and email marketing strategy we could bring people into the Minutemen ecosystem then cheaply marketing to them via email, we could effectively pre-sell people on the brand and mission before a call to action to buy.

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Combine this with offer-driven landing pages for cold traffic and we created a winning strategy that supported a 7%+ average conversion rate with some days averaging above 10%!

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Foundational Errors

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Although it may seem like a “duh” statement, getting your mobile experience dialed in can have a massive impact on your conversions. On the old Minutemen site, nearly every page had some kind of error on mobile. Here were some of the common ones:

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• Images being cut off
• Grids not stacking from desktop to mobile
• Unnecessary content gaps and spacing

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In addition to these errors, the product pages themselves suffered from severe inconsistencies that made it tough for people to know which coffee they wanted to order and even how to order it.

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By looking through the customer service messages we quickly realized that people were not finding enough information on the product pages to make an educated buying decision. For example, only about a third of the coffees had information about the roast and flavor notes.

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At the end of the day, your product pages need to educate your customers about your product and your brand by answering questions that they might have before they even have to ask them. In other words, reduce confusion and buyer friction.

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Product And Collection Navigation

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The next area of improvement for Minutemen was on their navigation. On the old site, navigation was incredibly simple with a single collection of products for people to “shop all”.

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For brands with a low sku count, this isn;t necessarily a problem, but for brands that have a higher sku count, navigation and collection organization is critical for helping people find the products they are looking for.

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Everyone drinks coffee differently and they have different roast preferences so creating collections based on how the customer wants to order helped people find their favorite coffee easier than ever before.

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Instead of sifting through 50+ products to find the 1lb bag of medium roasted beans, people can see all of the medium roast bags in one view.

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Pro Tip: create cross collections to give people different shopping options. For example, 

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Trickle Down Conversions

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A common mistake that marketers and brand owners make when it comes to conversion rates is focusing on the actual end purchase.

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Instead, we look at the relationship between the end purchase, the checkout, and the add to cart. Typically, we like to see the add to cart rate trickle down to the purchase at about a between a 2:1 and 3:1 rate. 

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Any bigger of a gap we see that there’s a pinch point in the buyer’s commitment to the purchase or there’s an issue with checkout itself (ex. shipping). The important thing to note here is that as long as that proportion stays in spec, then the goal should be to encourage more add to carts.

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With Minutemen starting at a 1:2.022 rate to begin with, we were in a healthy spot. As we scaled up, we maintained a healthy trickle down rate and only slightly dipped to a 1:2.341 trickle down rate, which is still well within spec!

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To help boost the add to cart rate, we restructured the product page and buy boxes to help people have better brand commitment as well as more information about the coffee they are looking at.

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The metafield-driven product pages share information about the different coffee roasts in numerous areas throughout the page so shoppers have multiple places to learn about each individual roast so they can buy something that fits their preferred flavor palette.

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To take it a step further, we saw that we had a high rate of people clicking through multiple coffees to find the roast they were looking for. This caused people to click back and forth throughout the site, so we made it easier to navigate to other roasts both in the mega menu and on the actual product page which led to a faster product discovery phase.

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Product And Brand Knowledge

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As a polarizing, mission driven brand, it was absolutely essential to share as much information about the brand as possible. Our goal here was to boost buyer commitment by sharing how deep into the patriotic mission Minutemen is.

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Remember, the better fit the product is for the audience, the better it will sell and with Minutemen’s audience being very committed to the patriot lifestyle so we focused on building a patriotic design that matches their expectations.

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To take that a step further, we also created sections throughout the site to share information about charities, causes, and impact groups that Minutemen supports. We wanted to show our audience just how committed the brand is to the mission. 

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To summarize, we helped Minutemen 2-3x their conversions by helping them build a growth strategy that revolved around a deeply engaged audience and a high engaging and informative website.

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By maximizing the UI and UX on the website, we could build brand loyalty throughout the shopping experience which helped up achieve this massive conversion rate.