BUSI 439 Week 6 Project Overview and Introduction Example

Conversion and Optimization Strategy Plan for Pine Hollow Candle Company: Project Overview and Introduction

Table of Contents

Introduction

Pine Hollow Candle Company makes soy candles, wax melts and home fragrance in a small workshop and sells about 85 percent of its products online, with the rest sold through gift shops. Its website attracts about 150,000 visits a month, a level of traffic that many small brands would envy, but it converts only 1.6 percent of those visits into orders. The gap between devices is striking. Phones bring 72 percent of visits but convert at 1.1 percent, while computers convert at 2.9 percent. Three in four shoppers who add a candle to a cart leave without buying, and only about a quarter of customers return within a year.

Roberts and Zahay (2018) treat conversion as the point where an Internet marketing program proves its worth, and they stress that it depends on measuring customer behavior accurately before trying to change it. Research supports that order. Wedel and Kannan (2016) describe how the data now available to marketers, from clickstreams to purchase histories, can guide decisions about customers and channels only when firms build the analytics to interpret it, and Germann et al. (2013) reported that companies using analytics more widely in marketing decisions performed better, and that the advantage grew where competition was fiercer. Home fragrance is such an industry, crowded with large brands and marketplaces.

This plan sets a twelve-month goal of raising Pine Hollow's conversion rate to 2.2 percent, with mobile conversion rising to 1.7 percent, while increasing average order value and repeat purchase. It begins with the company's current performance and a measurement framework, diagnoses where and why shoppers leave, proposes optimization strategies matched to each cause, and closes with a testing schedule and a budget that show how each change will be proved before it is adopted.

Overview of the Sections

The Executive Summary will state the problem, goals, strategies, budget and expected return on a single page. The Company Profile will describe Pine Hollow's products, customers and channels and present the baseline figures above in a table. Conversion Goals will turn the twelve-month goal into key performance indicators for each stage of the funnel and each device. The Analytics and Measurement Framework will define how each indicator is tracked and how results will be attributed across email, search and social channels. The Diagnosis will trace the losses in the funnel to their causes using the company's analytics and research on cart abandonment, shipping costs and trust. Optimization Strategies will propose changes to mobile product pages, checkout, reviews and email, each tied to a cause and a metric. The Testing and Implementation Schedule will order the changes into controlled experiments over twelve months. The Budget and Financial Impact section will compare the program's cost with the revenue the targets imply, and the Conclusion will summarize the plan and the decisions the owners must make first. Pine Hollow does not need more visitors; it needs the visitors it already has to find buying a candle on a phone as easy as smelling one in a shop.

References

Germann, F., Lilien, G. L., & Rangaswamy, A. (2013). Performance implications of deploying marketing analytics. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 30(2), 114-128. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2012.10.001

Roberts, M. L., & Zahay, D. (2018). Internet marketing: Integrating online and offline strategies (4th ed.). Cengage Learning.

Wedel, M., & Kannan, P. K. (2016). Marketing analytics for data-rich environments. Journal of Marketing, 80(6), 97-121. https://doi.org/10.1509/jm.15.0413