These days, it’s critical for ecommerce businesses to be able to build relationships with customers.
It’s not enough to just have an amazing product—I mean, this is important—but what’s also key is having the ability to learn about your customers and communicate with them on various channels.
Amazon and other online marketplaces make this difficult; nearly impossible, even.
While these online marketplaces can be great channels to get a lot of sales, there isn’t an easy way for you to know who purchased your product and be able to follow up with them—even just to say thanks.
There’s a lot of work that goes into building your own ecommerce website and investing in tools like email and SMS marketing. But for Office Oasis, a brand selling feel-good office essentials, it was worth it.
“Owned marketing channels are absolutely critical in developing a relationship with our customers and prospective customers. From the feel the visitor gets when they first interact with our website, to the tone of our emails a customer reads, these small touchpoints really help give the customer an understanding of our brand and purpose,” said Kevin Lehoe, Co-Founder of Office Oasis.
Let’s see how Kevin and Fuel Made partnered together to revamp the Office Oasis website and build a strategy around owned marketing channels, and the results they’ve seen since.
What is Office Oasis?
Office Oasis is changing the way people think about their office.
People spend so much time in small office spaces that are surrounded by ugly, uncomfortable, or outdated items.
Kevin and the Office Oasis team wanted to change that by bringing life to essential office products in a way that's modern, aesthetically pleasing, and functional so people can feel good in their office
…Helping you think of your office as an oasis.
In fact, you may already be familiar with the team’s signature product: the rollerblade office chair wheel, which sadly have been copied by many other brands on Amazon.
Que the copycats
Office Oasis originally found a lot of success on Amazon. In fact, they were the original creator of the popular rollerblade office chair wheels.
But, sure enough, other businesses saw the success of these wheels and started to build knockoffs, which quickly began to flood the Amazon marketplace.
With increased competition on their number one marketplace, the Office Oasis team knew they needed to be able to communicate better with customers about what makes their products different, specifically on owned marketing channels.
“I knew our brand needed a proper home base on which to build on, and our website really is the central point. We wanted to build out our vision for the brand, what we stand for, and properly display the products we offer.”
- Kevin Lahoe
First, Kevin decided to redesign the Office Oasis website, which led him to partner up with our strategic web design team for a new and improved user experience (UX).
Our approach to the new Office Oasis UX
After our strategist reviewed data across Office Oasis’ Google Analytics, heatmaps, and more, we came up with five key areas of opportunity, which we’ll dive into next.
1. Communicate what makes Office Oasis different
Office Oasis has always been known for its high-quality products and reliable customer service, but for new customers, these benefits weren’t clear on the original website.
Since there are so many copycat brands now, we highlighted three key messages on how Office Oasis stands apart from competitors to make sure shoppers know why they should purchase from them.
The three messages we focused on are their high-quality products, stellar customer service and support, and promoting their “feel-good guarantee.”
We added these benefits to different areas across the website, including the home page, about page, product description pages, and in the FAQs.
The result? Since launching the new site with these key messages shared more clearly, Office Oasis’ new visitor conversion rate has increased by over 57%.
“Our company started as an Amazon-only business, and we really didn't understand the full value of communication and relationship building. Now, having more of our customers come through our website, we're actually able to create lifetime fans of our brand. We get to tell our story, listen to customer feedback and ideas, and truly interact in a meaningful way with them,” said Kevin.
2. Improve the mobile experience
On the old website, visitors were spending about half the time on the mobile version compared to desktop—and they would spend about $15 less per transaction.
From what we could tell from Office Oasis’ data, customers on the mobile site would visit the website only to buy the rollerblade chair wheels without realizing there are many other products available in the catalog.
The mobile shopping experience needed to be more seamless from discovery to conversion, including
- Streamlining PDPs to be easier to scroll through on smaller devices
- Implement best practices like a sticky add-to-cart
- Redesign the mobile menu
These improvements had a great payoff: Office Oasis saw a 62% increase in its mobile conversion rate. On top of that, Office Oasis’ Google Page Speed score improved by 40% on mobile!
3. Highlight Office Oasis’ full product offering
Office Oasis’ customers have always liked the idea of the brand—the comfortable products, modern aesthetic, feel-good work space—but on the original website they didn’t realize how many products Office Oasis sells.
In fact, almost half of the visitors on the site would bounce off the homepage right after the hero section, meaning they weren’t seeing the highlighted product categories or value propositions.
Through SEO data, we could see that the majority of website visitors came from keywords related to the rollerblade wheels (80% of the top 20 search queries were related to office chair wheels and casters).
This data gave us our opportunity.
We highlighted the rollerblade wheels in the new navigation menu, helping reduce visitor frustration and increasing the likelihood that visitors stay on site long enough to learn about other products.
Essentially, Office Oasis capitalized on this organic traffic to drive users toward other product pages by upselling complementary items that have a higher ticket price, such as office chairs and monitor stands.
Because of this small change, Office Oasis’ average price per transaction increased over 50%, and its average revenue per session increased 34%.
4. Build an easier check-out process
On the old site, Kevin’s customer service team would often get messages from customers who weren’t able to checkout. As a business owner, that can be disheartening to hear.
It was clear that the new Office Oasis website needed an easier sales funnel, removing all barriers to purchase.
To do this, we removed the competing call-to-action buttons. Originally there were CTAs for “view cart,” “checkout,” and “products you may like.” The “view cart” button was competing with the checkout CTA, and it was unnecessary as customers were already viewing their full cart.
Not to mention, in the old cart design the upsell offer was partially blocked by the live chat app. (Below is a screenshot of the old cart experience.)
The new and improved cart design is much cleaner, offering only a simple “checkout” CTA and the subtotal.
5. Create a clear content hierarchy on product pages
There was a great opportunity to improve Office Oasis’ product pages. Before launching the new site, their bounce rate on these pages ranged from 55-85%. Keep in mind, the average product page bounce rate tends to range between 40-60%.
To improve this, we focused on two things:
Streamline the PDP content: The original product pages had a lot of content on them. In the updated design, we created a hierarchy to make sure the most important information is at the top. We also updated the formatting to increase readability.
Update the design and video content: Office Oasis did have a video featuring its products, which is great considering viewers are 65-85% more likely to make a purchase after watching a product video.
However, the heatmaps were showing that most viewers were skipping over the video on the original website. For the new design, we placed the video in the center of the page just below the product details. We also embedded it with the rest of the product photos in the product image gallery.
With these improvements, the brand’s desktop conversion rate increased by more than 49%!
While Office Oasis’ updated UX and UI are a part of their improved conversion rates, Kevin and his team have also done a great job of building trust with their consumers, which has helped with their continued success.
The importance of establishing trust online
When asked what businesses should consider when trying to build trust with consumers from their website, Kevin said, “To us, it seems that building trust with customers through our website comes from a few sources: consistent branded design, transparent and clear language throughout, story-telling, and customer service availability.”
These were all points we were able to hit on when redesigning the Office Oasis website, but the team didn’t stop there—they went omnichannel with the new and improved “feel good” vibe.
Investing in email marketing after launching the new website
Office Oasis wasn’t doing very much email marketing before working with our team.
To drive traffic to their site, they relied on organic traffic from blog posts, advertisements via Google Shopping, and customers that would visit the website after making a purchase from Amazon. But these sources didn’t lead to very high traffic.
At the time, roughly 85% of their website visitors were new. And while only 15% of their traffic was returning visitors, these shoppers actually converted at a 300% higher rate and spent nearly 10% more per transaction.
It was clear to Kevin that he needed to build better customer relationships to keep them coming back. After the website project wrapped up, Kevin started working with Fuel Made’s email marketing team with the goal of increasing his return visitor rate.
Building a strategy geared toward owned channels
The strategy for Office Oasis was to focus on gradual increases. We started with just a few flows, and added more detail and complexity to their emails over time.
Let’s review the timeline together.
March 2021
It was March 2021 when we started launching flows on Klaviyo for Office Oasis, consisting of just a welcome series and an abandoned cart flow.
At this time, only 6% of Office Oasis’ revenue was coming from email flows.
May 2021
By May, we added a post-purchase flow and a newsletter welcome series.
Even though this was just two months after launching email flows, 15% of Office Oasis’ revenue was coming from Klaviyo—a huge boost from the 6% they started with.
November 2021
Finally, for November, Office Oasis had all the flows mentioned above plus a browse abandonment flow and Black Friday campaigns.
This was their first year ever participating in Black Friday, and 20% of their revenue came from Klaviyo during this month.
Essentially, in just six months after launching, Office Oasis increased its revenue from Klaviyo by 233%.
All systems in place
All of Office Oasis’ emails follow the same vibe that customers get from the website, but they take it one step further by sharing value-add content that isn’t available on the website, including product education, complementary recommendations, and even personal messages from the founder letting customers know how they can reach him if they need help.
Having put the email marketing systems in place, Office Oasis is now able to continue scaling website traffic and interacting with customers—all while showing their brand values and making customers feel good about their work space.
“We’ve noticed more customer interaction, meaning we get to continue building long-term relationships with our customers.”
- Kevin Lehoe
Office Oasis has seen great success since redesigning their website and focusing on email marketing.
While Amazon is still their number one channel, they’re now able to capture more visitors for their email list—whether they come from Amazon or organic search—and nurture them into becoming paid shoppers.
And they’re not stopping here. Next, Office Oasis will be experimenting in the SMS space.
The results? Stay tuned. ;)
P.S. Don't hesitate to contact our team here if you're looking to help revamping your website experience.
