BUSI 439 Week 8 Conversion and Optimization Strategy Plan Example

Conversion and Optimization Strategy Plan: Pine Hollow Candle Company

Executive Summary

Pine Hollow Candle Company sells most of its candles and home fragrance through its own website, which receives about 150,000 visits a month and turns 1.6 percent of them into orders averaging $52. That rate leaves most of the company's marketing investment unrewarded. Two problems explain much of the shortfall: shoppers on phones, who bring nearly three quarters of all visits, buy at 1.1 percent, while computer shoppers buy at 2.9 percent; and 76 percent of carts are abandoned, many at the moment shipping charges appear.

This plan aims to lift the overall conversion rate to 2.2 percent within twelve months, with phone conversion reaching 1.7 percent, while raising the average order to $56 and the share of customers who buy again within a year from 24 to 32 percent. It begins by fixing measurement, because the company's current reports credit each sale to the last click and cannot separate phone and computer behavior reliably. It then proposes changes to mobile product pages, shipping costs, checkout, reviews and email, each aimed at a diagnosed cause and each tested against the current version before adoption. The first-year program costs about $85,000. If its targets are met, monthly online revenue will rise from about $125,000 to about $183,000, adding roughly $690,000 a year at full effect and repaying the investment many times over.

Company Profile and Current Website Performance

Pine Hollow began as a two-person workshop and now employs eleven people who pour, package and ship candles. Its products, about 60 scents in three sizes along with wax melts and reed diffusers, sell for $18 to $44. About 85 percent of revenue comes from the website and the rest from roughly 40 gift shops that buy wholesale. The company's customers are mostly women aged 25 to 54 who buy for themselves and as gifts, with strong peaks before Mother's Day and from November through December.

Traffic comes from several sources: organic search for scent names and gift ideas, Instagram and Pinterest posts, paid social ads, a growing email list of about 38,000 subscribers, and visitors who type the company's name directly. The website runs on a common hosted store platform with a standard theme that was designed primarily for computer screens and adapted to phones. Roberts and Zahay (2018) note that a site's design must serve the devices customers actually use, and for Pine Hollow that now means phones first.

The numbers describe a brand that attracts interest but struggles to convert it. A visitor on a phone is less than half as likely to buy as one on a computer, and phones carry most of the traffic. Raising phone conversion alone to the computer rate would more than double the company's orders, so the phone experience is the plan's central concern.

Competitive Context

Pine Hollow competes with national candle chains that run their own polished sites and frequent sales, with marketplace sellers that offer low prices and fast delivery, and with hundreds of small makers selling through their own stores and craft marketplaces. It cannot match the chains on discounts or the marketplaces on delivery speed. Its advantages are its scents, which customers describe in reviews as distinctive, its hand-poured story and its loyal email list. Those advantages matter only if the website communicates them, and the diagnosis below shows that on phones it often does not. Benchmarks from the company's own data are more useful here than industry averages: computer shoppers already convert at 2.9 percent, which shows that the products and prices can sell online when the experience allows it.

Conversion Goals and Key Performance Indicators

The plan's goals are set at levels that research and the company's own computer conversion rate suggest are reachable, not at the level of the best-performing stores in the industry. Each is broken into indicators that show which part of the funnel is improving.

If phone conversion reaches 1.7 percent and computer conversion 3.4 percent on today's traffic mix, the site will produce about 3,260 orders a month. At an average order of $56, monthly online revenue would be about $183,000. Gupta et al. (2006) describe customer lifetime value as the present value of the profits a customer generates over the whole relationship, and they show how firms use it to judge what a customer is worth acquiring and keeping. The repeat purchase goal therefore matters as much as the first conversion: every point of improvement in repeat buying raises the value of every customer the site converts.

Analytics and Measurement Framework

Why Measurement Comes First

Pine Hollow's analytics today count visits, orders and revenue in total, and the store platform credits each order to the last source the customer clicked. Phone and computer figures are available, but a shopper who looks at candles on a phone at lunch and orders from a laptop that evening appears as two strangers, which makes the phone experience look even weaker than it is and hides its role in purchases. Wedel and Kannan (2016) argue that the value of marketing data depends on the analytic capabilities firms build around it, from data collection to models that support decisions, and Germann et al. (2013) linked broader use of marketing analytics inside companies to stronger company results. The first quarter of the plan therefore builds the measurement the rest of the plan will rely on.

Tracking the Funnel Stage by Stage

The company will define six stages for every session: landing, product view, add to cart, checkout start, shipping and payment, and order. Each will be recorded with the device, the traffic source and whether the visitor is new or returning. Sismeiro and Bucklin (2004) modeled online purchasing as a sequence of tasks, such as configuring a product, entering personal information and confirming an order, and showed that analyzing each task separately revealed where visitors failed and which earlier browsing behavior predicted completion. Pine Hollow will apply the same logic to its six stages, so that each optimization can be judged by the stage it is meant to improve.

Following Visitors Across Visits and Devices

A single visit rarely tells the whole story. Moe and Fader (2004) modeled conversion at e-commerce sites across repeated visits and found that a shopper's likelihood of buying on any visit depended on that shopper's earlier visiting and purchasing, so visits accumulate toward a purchase rather than standing alone. Bucklin and Sismeiro (2009) reviewed the growing use of clickstream data in marketing and described how it can show not only what visitors buy but how they search and decide. To capture this, Pine Hollow will encourage visitors to sign in or join the email list early, using a first-order sample offer, so that sessions on different devices can be linked to one shopper. The analytics will then report conversion over a 30-day window for each shopper, alongside the familiar per-visit rate.

Attributing Sales Across Channels

The plan replaces last-click credit with multi-touch attribution. Li and Kannan (2014) developed a model that attributes conversions across search, email, display and referral channels and validated it with a field experiment, finding that its estimates of each channel's contribution differed considerably from those implied by last-click metrics. Pine Hollow will begin with a position-based model, which gives most credit to the first and last touches and divides the rest among those in between, and will check it against holdout tests for paid social ads and email, in which a random group of customers is withheld from a channel to measure what it truly adds.

Segmenting Visitors

Averages hide the differences that matter for optimization. The analytics will report every indicator for at least four segments: new and returning visitors, phone and computer visitors, visitors from each major traffic source, and visitors in gift seasons compared with the rest of the year. A returning email subscriber on a computer and a first-time visitor arriving from a social ad on a phone are different shoppers with different needs, and a change that helps one may not help the other. Segment reports will also guard against a common error in testing, in which a change that helps a large segment slightly hides a change that harms a smaller but valuable one. Gift-season reporting matters for a business whose two peak periods produce a large share of annual revenue.

The Reporting Rhythm

A dashboard will show the key performance indicators weekly by device and source. Each month the owners and the marketing lead will review it together, along with the results of any completed tests. Each quarter they will compare progress with the twelve-month targets and adjust priorities.

Diagnosis of Conversion Problems

Phone Product Pages Do Not Sell the Scent

Shoppers cannot smell a candle online, so the product page must do the work of the shop counter. On computers, Pine Hollow's pages show large photos, scent notes and a description beside the price and button. On phones, the same content collapses into a long column in which the scent notes appear far below the photos and the reviews appear at the very bottom. Session recordings show phone visitors swiping through photos and leaving without scrolling to the description. Only 6 percent of phone visitors to a product page add an item to the cart, against 11 percent on computers. In research by Venkatesh and Agarwal (2006), how usable shoppers judged a site to be, from the quality of its content to its ease of use and its fit with the online medium, predicted both whether they intended to buy and whether they did. Pine Hollow's phone pages fail the test of being made for the medium: they are computer pages squeezed onto a small screen.

Reviews Are Hidden and Thin

Only about a third of products have more than five reviews, and on phones the reviews sit below several screens of other content. Ludwig et al. (2013) found that the affective content of reviews influenced conversion rates, with more positive emotion raising conversion at a diminishing rate, and that reviews whose language matched the style typical of a product's interest group also increased conversion. For a product whose appeal is sensory and emotional, reviews that describe how a scent makes a room feel are among the most persuasive content a page can carry.

Gift Shoppers Cannot Find Gifts Quickly

About a third of orders in November and December include a gift message, but the site offers no way to shop by recipient, budget or occasion. Gift shoppers must browse 60 scents by name, which means little to someone buying for another person. Analytics show that visitors who arrive on gift-related search terms view more pages than other visitors yet convert at a lower rate, a sign of searching without finding. Shoppers buying for others also worry about delivery dates, which the site does not show until checkout.

Phone Pages Load Slowly

The theme loads large, uncompressed photos and several scripts for features the company no longer uses. On a typical phone connection, product pages take about five seconds to become usable. Phone visitors who land on a product page from a social post leave without a second page view far more often than computer visitors, and the slow load likely explains part of that gap, since the post that brought them promised a beautiful candle and the page shows them an empty frame.

Shipping Costs Appear Late

Shipping charges, a flat $7.95 on all orders below $75, first appear at the shipping step of checkout. The company's funnel data show that 38 percent of shoppers who reach that step leave. Kukar-Kinney and Close (2010) found that concern about total costs was a leading driver of online cart abandonment, along with the use of the cart as a holding place for items shoppers were still considering. According to Lewis (2006), the way a retailer charged for shipping shaped both the decision to order and the size of the order, as buyers enlarged baskets to reach cheaper or free shipping levels. A $7.95 charge on a single $24 candle adds a third to the price.

Checkout Asks for Too Much on a Small Screen

The checkout requires shoppers to create an account, enter a billing and shipping address separately and type a card number. On a phone, this means more than 20 taps and fields. Express payment options exist on the platform but are not enabled. Phone shoppers who start checkout complete it 41 percent of the time, against 63 percent on computers.

Trust Signals Are Weak for New Visitors

New visitors, most of them arriving from social posts, see no returns policy, no information about the workshop and no indication of how long delivery takes until checkout. Schlosser et al. (2006) showed that when a site looked like the product of real investment, visitors credited the company with more competence and honesty and became more willing to buy. A small brand must earn trust quickly, and Pine Hollow's site does little to show the care that goes into its candles.

First Buyers Are Not Invited Back

After a first order, customers receive a receipt and a shipping notice, then nothing until the next sale announcement to the whole list. There is no follow-up about burning the candle well, no request for a review and no reminder when a candle is likely to run out. With 24 percent of customers returning within a year, most first purchases do not become relationships.

Optimization Strategies

Rebuild the Phone Product Page

The phone product page will be designed for the phone first. The top screen will show one large photo, the scent name, three scent notes in plain words, the price and the add-to-cart button. A short line beneath will give the average rating and the number of reviews, linked to the reviews section. Swiping will move through photos of the candle lit in a room, the label and the size compared with a coffee mug. A sticky add-to-cart button will stay visible as the shopper scrolls. Below, the page will offer a "smells like" comparison to familiar scents, burn time and care tips. The change answers the usability failure diagnosed above and aims to raise phone add-to-cart rates from 6 to 9 percent.

Grow and Feature Reviews

Every customer will receive a review request twelve days after delivery, timed for after a few burns, with a simple form that asks for a star rating and an answer to one question: what does this candle make your home feel like? Reviews with photos will be featured near the top of the page. The company will publish negative reviews as well as positive ones, answering each with care, since an honest mix is more believable than uniform praise. The goal is at least ten reviews on every core scent within six months.

Show Shipping Early and Set a Threshold That Lifts Orders

Each product page and the cart will state the shipping cost, with a progress bar showing how much more is needed for free shipping. The free shipping threshold will fall from $75 to $60, just above the current average order, and a flat $4.95 rate will apply below it. Following the evidence on threshold effects, the cart will suggest small add-ons, such as wax melts or a wick trimmer, that bring an order over the line. The target is to reduce abandonment at the shipping step and lift the average order to $56.

Build a Gift Finder and Clear Gift Pages

A gift section will let shoppers choose by recipient, price and occasion, with three to five recommended candles for each combination and a gift set in each price range. Every gift page will show the last date to order for delivery before major holidays, and gift wrapping and a message will be offered on the product page rather than hidden in checkout. A short quiz, asking about the recipient's favorite season and whether they prefer fresh, warm or floral scents, will recommend three candles. The aim is to turn gift visitors' long searches into quick decisions, measured by gift-term visitors' conversion rate in the fourth quarter.

Make Phone Pages Fast

The developer will compress images, load photos below the first screen only as the shopper scrolls, and remove unused scripts, with a target of under two seconds before a phone product page is usable. This change is technical, invisible to shoppers when it works, and supports every other improvement in the plan, since a faster page gives the redesigned content the chance to be seen. Speed will be tracked weekly as its own indicator.

Shorten the Phone Checkout

Guest checkout will become the default, with an invitation to save details after the order. Express payment buttons will appear on the cart page, so shoppers can complete an order with a fingerprint or face scan, and the address form will use autocomplete. These changes aim to raise phone checkout completion from 41 to 55 percent.

Add Trust Where New Visitors Arrive

A short band on every page will state the returns promise, the typical delivery time and the fact that each candle is hand-poured in the company's own workshop, with a link to a page showing the team at work. Landing pages for social ads will open with a customer review and the workshop story rather than a generic banner. These additions are inexpensive and speak directly to the trust research.

Recover Carts and Build Repeat Purchase With Email

Shoppers who leave a cart after entering an email address will receive one reminder after a day showing the items and the free shipping progress, and a second after three days if they have not returned. After a first order, customers will receive a care guide when the package arrives, a review request after twelve days and a reorder reminder based on the candle's burn time, roughly six to eight weeks for the standard size. Seasonal emails will be segmented by past purchases, so that a customer who bought fresh scents in spring hears about summer scents first. Each email program will include a holdout group so that its true effect can be measured.

Testing and Implementation Schedule

Testing Principles

Kohavi et al. (2009) lay out how to run online experiments properly: shoppers are split at random between the existing page and a modified one, and the gap in an outcome chosen beforehand shows what the modification did. They warn that many changes thought to be improvements turn out to have no effect or a negative one, that experiments must include enough visitors and run long enough to detect real differences, and that the measure chosen for judging a test should reflect long-term value rather than a short-term click. Pine Hollow will follow these principles. Each test will name its primary indicator in advance, run for at least two full weeks to cover weekday and weekend shopping, and be judged on revenue per visitor as well as its stage indicator. Tests will avoid the peak holiday weeks, when shopper behavior is unusual, unless the test concerns holiday shopping itself.

Reading Results Without Fooling Ourselves

Small companies are especially prone to declaring early winners. A test that shows a large lift after three days often shrinks as more visitors arrive, and a test checked every day will eventually show a difference by chance. The analyst will therefore set each test's sample size in advance from the company's traffic and the smallest improvement worth detecting, and will not stop a test early because its first results look good. Results will be reported with their ranges of uncertainty, and any change with a small or uncertain effect will be weighed against its cost before adoption. Finally, a winning change will be checked again a few months later, since novelty can lift results briefly before they fade.

Twelve-Month Schedule

The order follows the size of each loss and the ease of each change. Checkout changes come first because the platform supports them with little development and they address the step with the largest loss. The phone product page requires design and development time and so follows. Email programs begin once reviews and the threshold are in place, since the emails will feature both.

Preparing for the Peak Seasons

The two gift seasons deserve their own preparation, because a change that fails in December costs far more than one that fails in March. Every change that will be live during the holidays must have been tested and confirmed by the end of September. In October, the team will check page speed under heavy traffic, confirm that the gift finder and delivery dates work on every device and prepare holiday email segments from the year's purchase data. During the peak weeks, no new tests will start; the team will instead watch the dashboard daily for problems, such as a payment option failing or a popular scent selling out, and fix them quickly. The same routine, shortened, will apply in the weeks before Mother's Day. After each season, the analyst will compare its results with the same season a year earlier, segment by segment, to judge how much of any gain came from the plan rather than from the calendar.

Responsibilities

The owner will approve the budget and attend the monthly review. A part-time e-commerce analyst, hired for the plan, will build the tracking and dashboard, design and analyze every test and report results. The company's marketing lead will manage the review and email programs, and a contract developer will build the phone product page and the checkout changes. Workshop staff will take the photos of candles in rooms and of the team at work.

Budget and Financial Impact

The shipping line reflects the expected cost of free shipping on orders between $60 and $75, partly offset by the larger orders the threshold should produce. The financial case rests on the targets. At 3,260 monthly orders averaging $56, online revenue would reach about $183,000 a month, an increase of about $58,000 over today. Because the targets will be reached gradually over the year, first-year added revenue is estimated more conservatively at about $300,000, with the full increase of roughly $690,000 a year arriving in year two if the gains hold. With a gross margin on candles of about 60 percent, first-year added gross profit of about $180,000 would cover the $85,000 program more than twice.

The plan also improves the value of each customer. If the repeat purchase rate rises from 24 to 32 percent, each new customer is worth more over time, which allows Pine Hollow to spend somewhat more to acquire customers through paid social ads without losing money. The analyst will estimate customer lifetime value by acquisition source each quarter, using the approach described by Gupta et al. (2006), so the marketing lead can shift spending toward the sources that bring customers who return.

Wholesale Accounts

The plan also touches the gift shops that sell Pine Hollow candles. Shop owners reorder through the website's wholesale portal, which shares the same slow theme. The faster pages and simpler checkout will be applied to the portal at no extra cost, and the analyst will track wholesale reorder frequency, since a smoother reorder process may lift that channel as well.

Risks and Safeguards

Some tests will fail, and the plan expects that. A change that loses will be reversed without regret, since learning what does not work protects the company from adopting it permanently. The lower shipping threshold carries a real cost if orders do not grow; the test will measure profit per order, not just conversion, and the threshold will revert if the numbers do not support it. Device linking depends on shoppers signing in or joining the email list, so cross-device figures will undercount the phone's role, and the analyst will report them as a lower bound. Finally, every email program will respect customers' choices, with clear preferences and immediate unsubscribes, since trust lost through over-messaging is costly to regain.

Responsible Use of Customer Data

The plan collects more data about shoppers than the company does today, so it also sets limits. Pine Hollow will collect only the information needed to run the store and improve it, will explain in plain language what it records and why, and will let customers choose which emails they receive. Testing will change page designs and offers, never prices shown to one shopper and not another for the same item at the same time. Reviews will never be edited to change their meaning, and the company will not offer rewards in exchange for positive ratings. These limits protect customers and protect the trust that a small, personal brand depends on.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Pine Hollow's challenge is not attracting attention; its candles already draw 150,000 visits a month. The challenge is converting that attention, especially on phones, where most shoppers browse and too few buy. Once a shopper has found the right candle on a phone, nothing on the page should stand between that choice and the order: not a hidden review, a surprise shipping charge or a twenty-field form. This plan begins by measuring the funnel properly, then answers each diagnosed cause with a specific change, tests every change against the current site and invests about $85,000 for an expected first-year gross profit gain more than twice that size.

Three decisions are needed now. The owners must approve the analyst position so tracking can begin in month one, enable express payment and guest checkout on the platform, and authorize the shipping threshold test. With those steps taken, the first test results will arrive within three months, and the company will know, rather than guess, which changes deserve to become permanent.

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