The Client
Bartesian likes to say they’re on a mission to pour the world the perfect premium cocktail, and man are they nailing it! Their eponymous Bartesian machine shakes up perfect craft cocktails on demand, won the 2020 Good Housekeeping Innovation Award, and has been named one of Oprah’s favorite things.
The Challenge
Bartesian’s growing D2C business needed a conversion-focused website that could deliver a seamless mobile experience for the 75% of users shopping Bartesian from their phones. They also needed a better way to sell their proprietary cocktail capsules on a subscription basis, and an international storefront to sell Bartesian in Canada.
Services
• Mobile-First Website Redesign
• Custom Subscription Program
• Smart Carts With Intuitive Upsells
• Custom User Portal For Easy Subscription Management
• Email Program Overhaul
• International Storefront Launch
The Results
16X
Revenue
Growth
10X
Subscription Growth
in 6 Months
50%
Improvement in
Conversion Rates
How We Did It
To raise conversion rates (CRO), we redesigned Bartesian’s critical pages to better support their customers’ path to purchase. First we took session recordings and heat maps to study user behavior and pain points. Then we used our findings to create a conversion-oriented layout, add intuitive navigation, thoughtful upsells, improvements to the checkout flow, and an eye-catching review interface. These discrete optimizations have helped Bartesian improve their conversion rates by 50%.
To turn new customers into cocktail subscribers, we created an email automation program designed to maximize direct response around subscriptions. Bartesian leverages the touchpoints we built into this outbound channel to automatically upsell each of their first-time buyers on the value, ease, and fun of using Bartesian on a subscription basis. And it works! Bartesian’s subscription program grew 10X this year, with email driving a large proportion of those conversions.
To improve subscriber retention and purchase frequency, we completely overhauled Bartesian’s subscription UX to make it more intuitive, flexible, and powerful. Before engaging P3, Bartesian had been limited to offering customers the simplest subscription options: Sign up. Choose your flavors. Receive the same variety in the same quantity every month forever.
This kind of subscription setup is great if you’re only selling one product that needs regular replenishment (like an air filter), but cocktails are all about the fun of variety.
Plus, like many home appliance brands, Bartesian is fundamentally a subscription business, with their capsules meant to drive more revenue in the long term than their machines. For Bartesian, nailing the online subscription experience was the key to creating a more sustainable growth channel and a predictable source of revenue.
To keep Bartesian riding high, P3 rebuilt their subscription flow from the ground up. We started by adding the ability to customize subscription quantity and select additional flavors directly from the subscriptions PDP.
Then, using subscription tech from our technology partner Recharge, we built a robust customer portal where Bartesian customers could shuffle their preferred flavors and quantities, pause their subscriptions, skip orders, and even view complete order histories in a few easy clicks.
All of these changes have helped Bartesian grow their subscription business a full 1,000% in just 6 months. And that’s without getting buried under a mountain of customer service tickets from folks who wanted to try the new latest and greatest cocktail capsule, but couldn’t add it to their subscription plan.
To take Bartesian international, P3 set up their Canadian storefront with a second instance in Shopify Plus. We used native Shopify tools to set the currency, and converted prices as directed by the Bartesian. Then we linked the product data from Bartesian’s US shop to their Canadian shop so that they could make unified changes on the fly. Just like that, they’ve unlocked a whole new market with minimal effort. And boy are our thirsty Canadian colleagues grateful!
Takeaways
Bartesian sells a market-leading product in a vertical that’s exploded since the emergence of COVID-19. To fully capitalize on their competitive advantages, they’ve invested heavily in ecommerce--focusing on improving their UX and subscriptions programs to mint as many new subscribers as possible, and supporting these changes with an effective direct response email program.
