One of the best and most trusted retailers of brushes & other creative tools for Procreate, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Affinity, RetroSupply worked with us from February 2020 until March 2021 to focus the business, slim their product line, thoughtfully test new design decisions, improve their operations, and meet customers’s needs.

Since we began working with RetroSupply, we’ve:

• Increased year-over-year conversion rate by 29.54% through a series of winning A/B tests, careful one-off design decisions, and high-level strategy to focus on what works. This resulted in a year-over-year revenue increase of 17.94% – which is effectively at 100% margin, given that RetroSupply sells mostly digital products.
• De-risked design operations by refining losing & inconclusive tests – or throwing them away entirely.
• Shifted into a design advisory role for 6 months, helping the whole team with community management & publishing strategy.
• Created a database of processes & procedures that help the entire team understand what to do and how to do it.

What we did for RetroSupply

We first worked with RetroSupply when they hired us for a roadmap in February 2020. We eventually transitioned that work into a full Draft Revise engagement shortly after the pandemic hit, and we worked together to increase conversion rate for two quarters.

Early questions surrounded RetroSupply’s blog. Why does it convert so poorly, yet get so much traffic? The answer, which we found through deep research into our analytics & asking past customers, was that people are more likely to pay us if they approach us through other avenues. This was a key insight that helped us focus the business, saving hundreds of hours in potential lost time.

Deeper questions concerned engagement across device platforms, with a rare focus on tablet, since Procreate support matters so much to RetroSupply’s customers. We also ran lots of heat & scroll maps that showed what customers care about, and reworked our home & product detail pages to better meet their needs. These reworks resulted in significant improvements to conversion rate.

Once we reached diminishing returns on our rounds of tests, we shifted our work to an ongoing design retainer at the end of 2020. Rather than running A/B tests every fortnight, we instead conducted our research like usual, and wrote up findings for one-off fixes. We also created a standard operating procedures database for RetroSupply’s team to operate more efficiently and less stressfully.

In the words of RetroSupply’s founder Dustin Lee:

I first hired Nick for a roadmap. I was worried about being disappointed by the results because of past experiences with consultants. This was not the case with Nick.

The report was packed with specific action-based insights that I would never have uncovered on my own. I saw parts of my business that were bottlenecking revenue I didn’t even know existed.

The value was so high that hiring Nick for Draft Revise was a no-brainer. As soon as we started, I knew I had made the right decision. Here are just a few of the things Nick did:

• Quickly set up proper tracking and analytics.
• Implemented A/B tests that instantly improved sales.
• Delivered detailed reports on A/B tests, so I understood the reasons behind why a test won or lost.
• Built off tests strategically so the success from one test would compound the next test’s results.
• Overdelivered on everything – and did it on time!

Nick was friendly but firm and honest about my business. Most important, Nick cared about RetroSupply succeeding. It was clear that he was invested in the success of our business on a deep level.

If you’re looking to improve your conversion rate, hire Nick. Yes, you’ll improve your conversion rate. But you’ll also gain a more holistic understanding of your business.

Need to start making decisions based on evidence?

You should probably start focusing your optimizations on mobile. Mobile traffic is exponentially increasing, yet ecommerce broadly fails to see commensurate gains in revenue from mobile.

Mobile is hard, but we can help. If you need a clear, coherent mobile strategy, and you want to increase your ARPU by 10% or more, reach out and apply for Draft Revise today.

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