Marie-Stella-Maris

Transactions increased by 73%
and the revenue 50% in 1 year

Marie-Stella-Maris is a beauty brand inspired by the human right to clean water and sanitation, today referred to as a Sustainable Development Goal by the United Nations. With a flagship store in Keizersgracht in Amsterdam, Marie-Stella-Maris is known for its luxurious home and beauty products mostly found in hotels. Our goal was to redesign a website that meets the online shopping and customers needs, and that can stand out in the current competitive market for digital shopping experiences, particularly during the pandemic. Given that the product and journey is fully digital, Swishfund approached Refreshworks to grow their business through the experiment loop. Our mission was to optimize the user journey from awareness to sales, learn what works best with the different audience segments, and build a trustworthy brand that people can rely on.

GROWTH APPROACH

To achieve the desired goals, we adopted a data-driven approach. The research began with the identification of the target group which summarized in four psychographic archetypes to understand our target audience. Once we knew who our client’s typical customers were, we chose a group of people who looked like the personas we had identified and conducted in-depth one-on-one interviews with them to understand how they use the website and what pain points we can identify to lower the threshold in the path to purchase. The usability research shed light on multiple opportunities to facilitate the shopping journey on the website from a UX perspective. It also helped the company adopt a more user-centric approach, which led to more transactions and a friendlier, simpler user journey. We ran a series of experiments such as A/B testing and email experiments to understand what makes the user tick! The most successful experiment was activating cart abandoners with an email experiment that led to an increase of 2.18% in transactions. Lastly, we established a holistic approach of awareness and acquisition channels. We differentiated paid advertising strategies and moved from being heavily-dependent on only one channel – Facebook – to relying on multiple ones – Google, Bing, Tradetracker, Pinterest.

SOCIAL CONTRIBUTION

A key point of our strategy was emphasizing Marie-Stella-Maris’s social contribution. The beauty brand is in fact inspired by the human right to clean water and sanitation and therefore donates 5% of each purchase to a water foundation. We underlined the importance of users’ purchases for the social cause by including their contribution in multiple sections of the website.

HEADER EXPERIMENTATION

We also ran a series of header experiments with sprints that tested a combination of messages and image brand assets to understand the brand impression on users, message comprehension and overall user reaction when landing on the website. We underlined the importance of users’ purchases for the social cause by including their contribution in multiple sections of the website.