Case Study

Achieving 5x ROI by adapting a data-driven Infrastructure in a D2C Company.

Founded by Tyler Macke, SendAFriend offers care packages to spread more love in our world. Buyers can send fluffy friends with personalized greeting cards to their loved ones. With every purchase, an additional contribution is donated to a non-profit organization to make the world a better place. From domestic abuse shelters to Veterinarians to children's hospitals, they also collect and deliver care packages to help others get through challenging times.

18 / 42 Successful Tests

15.1% Uplift in Online Shop Revenue

1.5 Years of Collaboration

Achieving 5x ROI by adapting a data-driven Infrastructure in a D2C Company.

Innovation meets Infrastructure: What Efforts SendAFriend has taken to differentiate itself from the competition.

SendAFriend has built a fast-growing brand in a short time with social media advertising. The six-figure adspend led to the business question of whether it was strategically sufficient to continue as usual or if further actions were necessary. The internal development team worked on new elements for the online store without knowing that these could have both a positive and negative impact on revenue. To minimize this risk, SendAFriend contacted Drip. The collaboration aimed to generate strategies for answering the following key questions:

What expertise do you need to improve e-shop performance?
How do you differentiate yourself in a highly competitive market environment?

Answering the questions requires a balance between marketing and store optimization. The framework for this is the entirety of the conversion optimization process. A company must practice each discipline included in it both individually and across departments. Stable and, above all, sustainable market positioning requires continuous insights and observations of customer behavior.

Fields of Conversion Optimization Expertise

The goal of the acquisition project is to accompany the partner company until it is strategically and operationally ready to mirror all disciplines internally. Drip is gradually transferring its expertise in all aspects of the testing process.

“I am beyond impressed with Drip’s attention to detail and knowledge of A/B testing. Not only are they phenomenal with their processes, but their team has become a part of our SendAFriend family. They have helped educate and train our team to approach business-wide problems with data-backed or testing-based solutions. Our entire team has an elevated knowledge of how testing can improve the business as a whole, and that’s all because of Drip. I highly recommend it!”

Tyler MackeFounder SendAFriend

SendAFriend generated frequent traffic on its website through paid advertising. For this reason, the consulting team had to analyze the platform and the prevailing target group at the beginning. The behavior of users who came across SendAFriend via TikTok is characterized by speed and innovation. These parameters must now be transferred to the customer journey in the store. To this end, quantitative and qualitative data analysis was used at the beginning to investigate the points in the sales funnel at which the user’s buying process is slowed down or even aborted. The Product Detail Page was particularly noticeable, with many visitors bouncing off both mobile and desktop users.

Drip recognized that the user group is discouraged from buying at this point because the buying process requires a custom greeting message. The speed the TikTok audience was originally used to could not be continued in the store because the users lacked the right words for the personal message.

To find out which sources of inspiration are most important to users, a survey was conducted. This revealed that the most frequent occasions for purchase can be divided into four categories:

Happy Birthday
Miss you
Get well
Just Because

The test team formulated the following hypothesis to verify whether paid traffic was slowed down by the required wording of a message within the order process:

IF we offer users inspirational text options for different occasions that can be customized and individualized as needed,

THEN the average revenue per visitor increases

BECAUSE we make the process -finding the right words- easier, even for rather difficult topics, such as get-well wishes (mental stimulation), which increases the convenience and ease of giving (cognitive relief).

Loui the Lobster

To reinforce SendAFriend’s #spreadthelove mission, Drip identified a High Impact Area that directly supports the company’s strategy and deals with the triggers of positive moods. For this purpose, a test was developed that stimulates the feelings and behavior of users under the influence of positive influences on the psyche using emojis (Positive Affect).

In 2019, the meta-analysis, “A Systematic Review of Emoji: Current Research and Future Perspectives,” by Bai et al. compiled findings explaining that emoji use has a positive impact on action intentions. Specifically, emojis help people express emotions and establish their own identities. They are considered an important medium for emotional communication online because they promote social interaction. Emojis play a significant role in attracting attention on different platforms and increasing users’ willingness to buy. However, most studies only examined users’ purchase intentions, not their actual buying behavior. Drip used the study results as a projection and established a test hypothesis to validate the impact of intention influences on user behavior:

IF we add emojis after each product title that relate to the product.

THEN the average revenue per visitor increases

BECAUSE, as studies have shown, emojis attract attention, stimulate interactions, and increase consumers’ positive affect, which in turn increases purchase intent.

The hypothesis that emojis lift the mood and thus influence buying behavior due to their everyday use within communication could be verified for all users.

Since February, during the cooperation with SendAFriend, we have taken 17 experiments live, resulting in monthly recurring additional revenues of 50.000€ as of now. At the same time, we support the company in training various key roles for testing through consulting sessions, especially in statistics and psychology, and providing a project management environment, research methods, a prioritization algorithm, development strategies, and more. With ongoing collaboration, the roadmap planning and joint prioritization of the testing idea were gradually handed over successfully.

Distribution of Responsibilities within the Takeover Project

SendAFriend is making very good progress and will be taking on accompanying responsibility for the design of the test prototypes soon – it is only a matter of time before they can fully portray the specialist skills they have learned internally in their experimentation program.

15%

Revenue Uplift

52,94%

Winrate per Test

17 Tests

from Q1 to Q3 2022