Boosting online sales: YUU's success story

By Gill Hayward and Kellie Forbes, YUU — Over a four-week period last Christmas, we sold a YUUbag every 12 minutes.  It took planning and preparation, but the pay-off was well worth it.

 

So, how did we do it and what advice can we offer other online retailers?

 

We know that getting traffic to your website is only part of the equation, making them want to spend time and shop is the key.   

 

High quality product and lifestyle photography is essential for any online business,as it’s often the shoppers first interaction with your brand and it’s essential to make that count.  

 

We always provide a full gallery of our products showcasing the multitude of features; after all nobody wants to buy something they can’t properly see or understand.  

 

This shouldn’t be limited to photography—use video to show your product in action and provide that all important virtual experience.

 

We’ve conducted lots of shopper research with existing and potential customers to help inform our web navigation.  We spent time phoning and speaking with customers and prospects to hear their terminology and the decisions they made when buying their YUUbag.  

 

For example, being able to shop by a child’s age and then colour was important, and this is reflected within our navigation.  

 

Some shoppers benefit from a helping hand. In the absence of a useful shop assistant asking, “can I help you with anything today?” We’ve found implementing an online chat tool highly successful to drive web sales.  Visitors will leave if they can’t find what they’re looking for or if they have questions which turn into barriers for not purchasing. All of this can easily be resolved with a simple chat functionality.  

 

So, you’ve managed to get the traffic to your site but whether they stay or not depends on how relevant they feel the content you’re offering is to them. Like a lot of brands, we have a variety of prospects on our site and we also know that there are different reasons why people purchase our YUUbags. As a result, we have a clear customer segmentation; this was fundamental to our ability to develop our website with relevant, engaging content which makes the difference to shoppers browsing and shoppers spending.  

 

For example, many of our shoppers find the ergonomic design of our YUUbags a highly motivating consideration for purchase which is why we have dedicated content showing exactly how our products provide comfort and support for growing spines.  

 

We also have shoppers looking to purchase a YUUbag at the best possible price, so clearly sign-posting our offers for these price conscious shoppers is important.  

 

As a children’s brand our user and chooser are two different audiences, and we understand the influence children have when it comes to buying a YUUbag.  We therefore developed the YUUclub – a place online where children can explore and interact with the brand with fun games and competitions.  

 

You really cannot afford not to have a mobile-friendly website. To have a successful website it’s important to recognise that the way in which your web visitors view and consume data is very different on mobile vs desktop devices.  

 

It’s also worth noting that Google looks more favourably at mobile responsive websites so taking the time to make sure your website is optimised for mobile will payback in terms of improved google rankings.  

 

Websites are organic and should evolve over time as your brand grows and your consumer insight becomes richer.  We often run AB tests on our key pages, including our homepage, to check that the content that we’re offering is relevant, engaging and driving the desired outcome.  We’ve also played around with some great technology tools such as heat maps to gain insight into the content driving the most action.  When combined with web analytics tools such as Google Analytics, it’s possible to gain a huge amount of insight.  We are constantly evaluating our traffic in terms of behaviour and taking these learnings to evolve our website to make it even more better.  

 

We’re not ones to rest on our laurels and we’ve been busy planning Christmas 2017. This year we’re bringing to market our most existing product to date – a GPS-enabled backpack, the YUUgo.  We’re Crowdfunding the launch with Indiegogo which means that we’re rewarding our supporters who order early with a whopping 40% discount.  We’re feeling confident that we’ll be beating last year’s record of a YUUbag sold every 12 minutes.