Cracka Wines Case Study

Cracka Wines is Australia’s largest online wine store. Launched in 2010, Cracka Wines has completely changed the way Australians buy wine. With 4,300 products from most major wine regions around the world, Cracka Wines pledges a user-friendly buying platform with user-friendly prices, offering customers up to 70 percent off the recommended retail price.

The company also has an auction option on its website for buying wine, offering consumers the chance to bid on wine from $1 per bottle.

This year, Cracka Wines was named one of the top100 Australian online retailers by the Power Retail E-Commerce Leaders’ Playbook.

In the competitive market of e-commerce, Cracka Wines wanted to ensure its website was easy to use and offered an informative and relevant experience to consumers. The brand was also determined to understand who is visiting its website and their intentions – not only to improve the customer experience but to identify additional sales opportunities as well.

Traffic to Cracka Wines is driven primarily through SEO but a lack of internal resources, and the absence of a dedicated analytics team, meant that the in-house team, while dynamic, was small and focused on maintenance rather than innovation.

The team identified that while they enjoyed high traffic volume, a number of customers were not converting, so Cracka Wines wanted to explore how it could capitalise on the high volume of visitors to increase sales.

Cracka Wines selected Webtrends Optimize to optimise its website, seeking to increase conversion rates and revenue through analytics, testing, targeting and personalisation.

While the in-house team had used software to get basic analytics, they needed a team of experts who could provide a managed service to help them through the process and implement a strategy that was appropriate to their business model and which would support the future growth of all digital channels.

Webtrends Optimize provides a complete selection of test and target types, including AB tests, MVT, advanced segmentation and behavioural targeting.

Using data gathered from Optimize and their analytics tool, difficult-to-find customer abandonment points were uncovered and once this more complete view of the customer journey was visible, Cracka Wines had a solid foundation to begin its optimisation program.

With a clear understanding of Cracka Wine’s unique requirements and challenges, Webtrends Optimize developed a new strategy of multivariate testing (MVT) to improve the company’s online potential.

After the initial consultancy, Cracka Wines launched a new responsive website, with Webtrends Optimize testing the responsive design across all devices to ensure a great customer experience.

To increase sales using an MVT strategy, Webtrends Optimize identified the homepage as a testing target as it had three-to-four bundles of products and presented the user with a long page.

Test 1

The first MVT test combined all products into a unified product carousel with tabs to navigate through the sections, making the web page shorter and easier to navigate, thereby increasing load speed. The winning version resulted in a huge 36% lift in sales from visitors entering the website at the homepage.

Test 2

The second test was then deployed on the ‘recently viewed items’ area to track visitors journey through the site and then re-displaying items they had shown interest in on their return. This MVT test involved both ‘post’ and ‘during’ session retargeting and the use of a price comparison tool, which resulted in a 13.5% uplift in sales.

Test 3

Following the success of the first and second tests, the team turned their attention to the displayed pricing strategy for MVT number 3. Cracka Wines originally displayed individual bottle pricing, but bottles had to be sold in cases of 12 units. The company wanted to be more upfront and show pricing by the case, but it was a controversial move internally as that pricing strategy is different from anything else on the market.

Using MVT to uncover insights about what motivates consumers to buy, tests were run on:

• bottle pricing / bottle savings
• bottle pricing / case savings
• case pricing / case savings

The winning outcome was a display of case pricing and case savings, and this resulted in an 18% uplift in sales. Once the testing was complete and Cracka Wines saw the results, the new design was immediately incorporated into their website code by their development team.