‘Finding Your MATCH…'
MATCH Pewter is made by hand in Italy. Both traditional and classic in design, their elegant pieces work well in both traditional and modern homes and become instant heirlooms. The MATCH collection has been featured by America’s most prestigious retailers for over 25 years.
Challenge
MATCH has been a longtime client of ZaneRay, and given their strong focus on their retail channel, had never used digital marketing before. In the wake of the pandemic, they needed some new levers to pull and shifted focus towards efforts that would grow their D2C channel. As a result of this shift in focus, MATCH partnered with Quiet Owl to set up measurements, test paid search & social campaigns, and improve the online buying experience. These efforts, aligned with ZaneRay and Quiet Owl’s recommendation to move MATCH onto a more modern open SaaS tech stack. The collective consensus, along with A/B testing conducted by Quiet Owl, informed the decision to move forward with a comprehensive website redesign and re-platforming effort onto Shopify.
Influence of Approach
Just as MATCH delved into digital marketing, tracking and privacy restrictions made attribution and analytics more opaque. With low purchase volume, fewer signals for algorithms, and little historical data to spot trends, it was hard to measure the impact of new campaigns in traditional ways. Quiet Owl overcame these obstacles by tracking each milestone in the buying process – not just ad spend and revenue. Touchpoints such as product page views, add-to-carts, and email sign-ups helped gauge how ‘cold’ ad traffic compared to loyal brand customers. This made the limitations of measuring the entire journey from ad click to purchase less critical – and provided more data points for optimization.
Benefits of Approach
This new marketing approach laid the foundation for MATCH to begin building a practice of digital marketing. This meant that MATCH would be less reliant on cookies & ad platform data, which has become much more opaque as privacy laws continue to evolve and Google continues to change the rules of the game. They also benefited from new visibility into their KPI’s through the creation of a monthly digital marketing scorecard which allowed them to scale budgets with more confidence.
Amplify the Brand and Optimize For D2C
Technologies and platforms are constantly evolving, and the ZaneRay team assessed MATCH’s business goals in light of their new focus on D2C. Shopify emerged as the platform best suited to help them achieve those goals. Moving them onto a SaaS platform would allow them to take advantage of modern technologies that would better support them as they continue to grow their business. The goal of this project was to modernize the tech stack, improve upon the user experience to better support a more focused D2C website, and leverage customer insights provided by the Quiet Owl team to inform both the decision to move forward in the replatforming effort as well as improve the user experience on the new site.
Testing To Validate the Opportunity
The MATCH site was meticulously designed to reflect the brand’s aesthetic, however, the site was built many years ago before mobile was paramount and e-commerce platforms like Shopify streamlined tracking and integrations. Collectively, Quiet Owl and ZaneRay were encouraging MATCH to take advantage of new technologies. Before deciding to move forward with a new website, MATCH needed to clearly understand the opportunity to ensure that the time and investment would pay off.
To provide these insights, Quiet Owl created an A/B testing plan to prioritize short-term fixes and validate the uplift from incremental upgrades. Once MATCH saw the improvements from a new home page, product pages, category, and collection pages, they received the insights needed to decide to move forward with the new site.
These were some of the improvements MATCH experienced during this testing period:
- 7% more product page views (from just home page changes)
- 8% conversion rate increase (from only improved product pages)
- 15% more email sign-ups
YoY Revenue Growth In Peak Season
A well-designed and highly optimized site ensures that the impact of marketing and optimization efforts is both supported and amplified. Making pewter by hand takes time, and building a digital marketing practice is no different. It’s a craft that requires a solid foundation for measurement, a commitment to learning by testing new growth channels, and a site that is optimized to simultaneously build the brand while selling more products. These collective efforts led to unprecedented growth for MATCH:
- 58% YoY revenue growth
- 48% increase in conversion rate
- 57% increase in email capture
The shared expertise, experience, and commitment of Quiet Owl and ZaneRay to cooperate with one another during the design and buildout of a new MATCH Shopify site, was extremely productive. We continue to reap the benefits of our (near) frictionless UI, and versatile Shopify platform. The numbers speak for themselves.
