How Behavioral Insights Grew Roots Of Fight’s Mobile Conversions by 19.4%

Roots Of Fight

Roots Of Fight is a media, lifestyle, and apparel ecommerce brand that celebrates the improbable achievements of today’s most legendary athletes, innovators, and cultural icons.

Their mission is to create high-end art, apparel, and experiences that do justice to each figure’s unique battle for greatness. Their products are frequently worn by celebrities such as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Joe Rogan, Mike Tyson, and Rihanna.

Finding out which elements of their site helps conversions, which ones don’t, and what’s missing to take them to the next level.

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Last year, Roots Of Fight’s COO Natalie Dimbleby and CEO Jesse Katz realized the company had to make more progress towards improving conversion rates on their website if they wanted to keep growing and remain competitive. With a website redesign in mind, they wanted to be able to optimize the experience of their users, and remove the site’s conversion roadblocks that were in the way of their dream ecommerce experience.‍

With their marketing team’s focus on other priorities, an upcoming website redesign, and no existing conversion optimization process in place, Natalie knew she had to find a partner that they could trust to:

• Help them understand their website visitors and customers in-depth. What makes them buy? What makes them hesitate? What to change on the site to get more people to buy?
• Find out which A/B tests to run on their website so they could grow through data-driven experimentation.
• Find out which A/B tests to run on their website so they could grow through data-driven experimentation.

A research and experimentation process that would guide them through a website redesign: the Testing Trifecta.

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Roots Of Fight finally turned to SplitBase. SplitBase’s Testing Trifecta process, which helps brands grow through insights and experimentation using analytics, usability research, and “human” research is what convinced them to move forward.

While our work with Roots Of Fight spans over a year, beginning with our signature Conversion Blueprint™ research process, and included many A/B tests that enabled them to redesign their website using data, one recent test revealed impactful user behavior insights that led to a significant increase in transactions for mobile users.

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It all started with Phase 1 of the Testing Trifecta’s process: Analytics

In the first phase of our optimization process, the Testing Trifecta, we dove deep into the company’s analytics to get a full understanding of their website: how people navigated, what were the top paths visitors took to purchase, and what were the top opportunities for optimization.

Through this research, we discovered that a large percentage of people who landed on their website barely browsed, and visited only a few pages and products before buying. It seemed like a large number of visitors knew what they were looking for, whether they were new to the brand, or not.

We dug deeper and through a number of other reports, we were able to find similar signs indicating that unlike traditional clothing brands where visitors heavily browse through collections, Roots Of Fight’s visitors had a clearer idea of what they wanted (e.g. a Bruce Lee t-shirt).

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Through “Human-focused” research, Phase 2 of the Trifecta, we started finding promising insights.

Numbers you get in analytics can’t tell us what people think, what they want, and the challenges they face. We started Phase 2, the Human research element of our process to discover exactly that.

We wanted to know why people bought from the brand, how they searched for products and navigated through the site.

Through usability research, mouse tracking, polls and customer surveys, we found that mobile users often knew what they wanted to buy, while also having a hard time finding specific products due to the brand’s large number of products.

The data from analytics and our human research allowed us to create a hypothesis for an A/B test. In this test we aimed to improve the experience of finding specific products on mobile, by making the search bar more visible site-wide. We thought: if we could get more people to find what they’re looking for, faster, it would likely increase sales.

Originally, the search bar could only be accessed by clicking on the magnifying glass button:

In the test’s variant, we made the search bar visible site-wide, improving search usability:

And in phase 3 of our Testing Trifecta process, we A/B tested those two versions of the website for approximately 3 weeks.

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