Dr. Squatch Adds $800,000+/Month in Revenue Through Conversion Optimization

Dr. Squatch is a fast-growing DTC brand that sells personal care products such as soaps and deodorants for men. The brand has scaled immensely over the past few years, going from $5m to over $100m in revenue in under two years.

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The brand approached SplitBase in 2019, just as their growth began to take off, to optimize their website’s experience.

Increasing conversion rate, average order value, and ultimately, customer lifetime value

When Dr. Squatch approached SplitBase, on-site AB testing was virtually non-existent. The brand was starting to see some growth, and improvements to the website were done on an ad-hoc basis, but there wasn’t any established process to research customers’ behaviors, and turn those insights into tests.

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As the brand scaled ad spend across a variety of channels and tested ad creatives aggressively, it became clear to them that not optimizing the onsite experience to increase average order value (AOV), conversion rate (CVR), and ultimately customer lifetime value (LTV), would lead to a huge missed opportunity. 

As the brand grew, many questions emerged:

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• Which products should we push the most traffic to for the least amount of conversion friction, and highest LTV?
• How can we get more people to sign up for the subscription?
• Should first-time visitors be pushed to individual products, bundles, or subscriptions?
• How can we increase the AOV of people buying individual products?
• What information is missing from the product pages that stop people from buying?

The brand needed solid customer research and an experimentation program that could scale, get their questions answered, and grow revenue.

Before diving into testing, we designed a customer research program to understand the customers’ experience with the brand. We wanted to get a deep understanding of how they were interacting with the website, uncover questions that were left unanswered, and hesitations that would hurt conversions.

On a more qualitative level, we also wanted to get a grasp on who exactly Dr. Squatch’s customers are. 

Are they just buying for themselves, or also for family members? What do they look for in personal care products? What other brands have they tried? Why have some of them decided to switch from legacy brands, to use Dr. Squatch’s products instead?

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This research process, conducted through in-depth analysis of their Google Analytics data, in conjunction with customer surveys, website polls, heatmaps, usability testing, and monitoring of customers’ comments on social media, helped our team at SplitBase build an extensive database of insights.

Based on those findings, we utilized our expertise in user experience and customer psychology, and partnered with the Dr. Squatch team to build an extensive experimentation pipeline with tests covering the checkout flow, product pages, collection pages, homepage, subscription & bundle flows, as well as landing pages.

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"From optimizing high traffic paid landing pages to testing complex features, SplitBase has been very valuable to our ecommerce website strategy. The team knows how to drive actionable insights - striking the right balance of qualitative & quantitative analysis in their approach."

- Stephen Pinto, Director of Product Management, Dr. Squatch

One test we ran came from discovery through their analytics that a large number of customers would buy more than 1 bar of soap at a time. This data matched up with what customers mentioned in the customer surveys.

This was interesting because the bar soap’s product pages didn’t have a quantity field for people to add multiple items at once, requiring people to click on add to cart multiple times to get their desired quantity.

We hypothesized that by not having a quantity field on the product pages, we weren’t prompting people to ask themselves if they wanted to buy more than one bar at a time, which likely reduced AOV by missing a chance to get people to buy larger quantities.

Additionally, we hypothesized that since qualitative and quantitative data shows us that many people buy at least 2 soaps at once, and since the products are relatively inexpensive, that if we made a quantity of 2 soaps the default on the product pages, more people would be 2 soaps at once, instead of only one, therefore increasing revenue per user (by increasing AOV, and hopefully not reducing CVR).

The result? This test specifically led to an increase of up to 54% in revenue per user for soap purchasers.