Make ’Em Laugh—Personally

The whole world was finally going green, but, ironically, Custom Direct’s seemingly ecofriendly business model was beginning to wilt. Since its inception in 1993, the company had used recycled paper to print custom-designed checks. But even recycled-paper checks have become passé now, as people turn to the convenience of online (and paperless!) bill-paying systems. So Custom Direct took its expertise in personalized printing and started GigglePrint, an online printing shop that allows customers to create personalized business cards, holiday cards, and postcards.

When GigglePrint launched last June, it used digital-marketing solutions provider Coremetrics solely for data collection. Then Sharon Moyston came along. After she came on board as Custom Direct’s Internet marketing manager in January 2008, the company began to take a serious look at how insight from Coremetrics could help increase conversions.

One pain point was GigglePrint’s poor site flow. At checkout, customers had a hard time completing a transaction. New customers were being redirected to the homepage after being asked to register. This completely disrupted the logical purchase flow, an inconvenience great enough to deter many shoppers from repeating their entire process. By using Coremetrics’ TruePath, a tool that tracks and analyzes visitors’ browsing patterns, GigglePrint was able to pinpoint exactly where customers stalled and subsequently dropped off. Within six months of identifying that single roadblock, the site saw a 13.4 percent decrease in cart abandonment. (See “Spiff Up Your Site!,” for more on Web-site design.)

Other site challenges were making business very difficult as well. Since GigglePrint requires all users to make their purchases online, contact center agents were having a hard time knowing exactly what customers were seeing on their browsers and how to effectively address their problems. Once GigglePrint identified the checkout-process issue, Moyston says, customer service calls dropped by more than 50 percent. Moreover, calls that used to be complaints about the site and purchase process are now service-oriented requests, such as whether or not customers can have a picture of their kids on a business card. (They can.)

Moyston uses Coremetrics’ LiveView solution to look at the activity taking place on each page of the Web site. The tool works as a site overlay that quantifies which elements of the page are active and which are idle. “Real estate is always an issue,” Moyston says, and Web sites should value the concept of less is more. Further tweaks helped to optimize the entire shopping process and boosted page views by 6.5 percent. Better still, the company has seen a 43 percent increase in conversions of both new and repeat customers.

While staff count saw little change after implementing the solution, roles shifted significantly, Moyston says. Instead of dedicating an entire team to site maintenance, GigglePrint is finally free to explore forward-looking improvements. The company will soon be rolling out Coremetrics’ Intelligent Offer, a solution that will automatically deliver relevant behavior-based recommendations to the visitor.

Without Coremetrics, finding the problem areas may have been near-impossible, but it takes initiative to convert the results into a tangible solution. For Moyston, GigglePrint’s success has meant continuous site monitoring, a task she commits to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The site is constantly being scrutinized and modified not only by the marketing team, but by business analysts, third-party consultants, and Coremetrics experts offering online best practices. “The edict here is ‘Just keep testing’—keep trying things, see what works, and fix things that don’t.” 

THE PAYOFF
With Coremetrics, GigglePrint has:

• decreased cart-abandonment by 13.4 percent;
  
• increased overall page views by 6.5 percent;
  
• boosted purchase conversions by 43 percent; and
  
• reduced incoming customer service calls by more than 50 percent.
  

Every month, CRM magazine covers the customer relationship management industry and beyond. To subscribe, please visit http://www.destinationcrm.com/subscribe/.

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