Retail market appeal improves conversions from cart to purchase

The Challenge:

The rise of fast fashion is a significant roadblock to sustainable retailers succeeding in the Gen Z market. Advertising attractive products enticed many buyers to visit and browse the site, but the company experienced friction in the conversion from cart to purchase, likely due to the higher-priced nature of their ethically-sourced goods. While CTR remained high, sales CVR for the company declined beginning in 2021 and halved by December 2022, highlighting the need for a revamped creative approach.

Alison Approach:

After collaborative sessions aiming to pinpoint the most apt KPI, it was determined that cart to sales CVR was most valuable for the retailer’s goal of improving lower funnel transaction activity. 

The account had a variety of media types, including banners, videos, and GIFs, all of which showed diverse KPI performance. Digging deeper into the creatives, Alison was able to determine that creative copy and characters heavily influenced CTR and purchase CVR. Slender, white models produced a 32% higher CTR than the account average, while diverse and realistic model body types showed a lower CTR but a 283% greater purchase CVR than the account average. 

Alison indicated that a balance of slender and diverse models in their creatives attracted clicks while also improving a viewer’s willingness to purchase later down the funnel.

The platform provided these key insights for attracting purchase intent

• Character Type: Diverse Model (+283% Purchase CVR)
• Character Presence: Multiple Models (+64% Purchase CVR)
• Creative Copy: Included (on par Purchase CVR)
• Creative Text: “For you, for Earth” (+20% Purchase CVR)

Further Insights

• Background: Beach performs well from February to early June, but performance declines in late June and early July
• Competitors successfully experimented with Sound: Female Voiceover

Results:

The retail company’s creatives showed a consistent CTR and a 139% improvement in account average sales CVR over three months after releasing the optimized creatives using a mix of diverse and slender models as well as experimenting with creative, copy, voiceover, and background.

Collaboration with Alison yielded three major results

1. Appealing to the target market using Alison’s insights to show an attractive yet realistic display of their products.
2. Gaining an awareness of competitors’ experiments and well-performing creative features to use as an advantage when building or modifying their creatives
3. Discovering which creative features perform well seasonally so that spend is not wasted on creatives that are predicted to lose their appeal in the coming months

With Alison’s insights, the retailer was able to gain greater conversions from cart to purchase, establish themselves as an accepting and diverse brand, and learn from their competitors’ successful features to reduce the need for testing.