Flipping Ecommerce on its Head
Bringing mindfulness to ecommerce in a way that leads to more conversions and fewer returns
Imagine this: it’s Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year and you’re a brand with customers on your website pushing the buy button, but instead of moving them down the funnel, you stop them and interrupt the buying process to ask them, “How are you feeling right now?”
Seems like a crazy thing to do right? Especially in a world that is dominated by closing sales and doing everything possible to get a consumer to hit buy. You’re literally pausing a conversion, making a customer examine his or her activity and second guess making a purchase. Nevertheless, that was the strategy Bearaby put into practice this past holiday season and the results might just surprise you.
“We came out with a black blanket for Black Friday, and we wanted to introduce the concept of mindfulness around it, because our hypothesis was that mostly we’re buying a lot of stuff at a discount that we don’t really need, it ends up in landfills and it doesn’t make us happy,” Kathrin Hamm says. “So we wanted to see, first of all, how it would be if basically our website is shut down, and people are sleeping through Black Friday. And then if you still want to come back the next day, we’re still making it difficult for you to get the product…. In addition, we wanted to see how you’re evaluating your feelings and how you are mindful when you purchase…. Basically how it worked was you come to the website and before you click to purchase, another question box pops up that literally makes you pause and asks you how are you feeling right now. And not like the normal, how are you and then you move on — we wanted to have people reflect on it and ask people do you really need this product right now? And if yes, how are you feeling? Are you anxious? Are you calm? Do you feel lonely, sad, happy?”
Hamm is the Founder and CEO of Bearaby, and she explains that mindfulness experiment, while risky, paid off in big ways.
“My initial hypothesis was that the conversion rate would go down, because you’re making it that difficult for people to get a product — you’re asking them to wait, sleep on it, listen to a poem, take a breathing exercise, tell me how you’re feeling and then take them into a consent form before you then finally can buy the product,” she says, “So I was actually expecting that we wouldn’t sell any of these blankets. I was telling the team that was working on it I’m like, ‘I think if we’re selling two blankets, that would be a good result.’ And we were quite surprised that our conversion rate was double our regular conversion rate.”
Bearaby was able to gain insights into consumer behavior and gather data that helped predict whether or not a customer was likely to return a product or not. And, most importantly, Bearaby was able to build more trust with customers and foster an authentic relationship centered around mental health and the customer’s well-being, which in today’s world goes a long way toward creating a loyal base of customers.
Connecting on a deeper level with those customers is what Hamm believes will propel brands forward in the future. That’s why she and her team implemented a similarly contrarian strategy to social media.
“What works well for us is that we’re trying to be helpful for the community,” Hamm explains. “So instead of just us as a brand talking and sharing what [products] we have, we realized a lot of the community is actually struggling with mental health anxiety. So what we did, for example, is that we used Instagram and connected it to an SMS platform. Where usually you send an SMS to inform people about the sales, we use it in a reverse way where we had actually an expert sitting on the other end of the line — a psychologist or general mental health counselor — and people could send in their questions that we got from Instagram but that also we got through SMS….We brought all these experts and we had to message this community of helpfulness and chat. And I think that just sparked a natural conversation and I think then people stick on and want to see what else the brand is doing and I think if we listen to that and we are reciprocating and not shouting out but we’re listening, it’s just organically … the community grows and is also excited about the brand.”
To learn more about how Hamm is using the results of these experiments to expand her business, tune into Up Next in Commerce, here.
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