Growing Sales, Naturally

It’s only fitting that Gaiam, the multi-faceted company aimed at consumers who value healthy living and environmentally friendly products, offers what might best be described as a Zen experience on its website.

Visitors to Gaiam.com find eco-travel opportunities, educational offerings, a like-minded dating site, an online yoga studio and a membership-based DVD club. The company sells products too — but in keeping with its nature, Gaiam focuses more on enlightenment than hard-core sales.

“We have recently gone back to our roots as a lifestyle brand,” says Bill Moran, e-commerce director for the Louisville, Colo.-based company. “Our new homepage introduces Gaiam and speaks to people who value eco-friendly living and natural health and personal growth. We have stopped making our first handshake one that only sells widgets.”

Consequently, the e-commerce portal of Gaiam.com is now one page deep from its home page. A companion site, Life.Gaiam.com, features articles with “sidebars” of related products that drive the user back to the e-commerce portal. The e-commerce portal will often link to articles on the Life site as well, so that those shopping for a new yoga mat might find an article on “50 Ways to Reuse Your Yoga Mat.”

“We’ve always had trouble displaying the breadth of our products,” Moran says. “How do we merchandise a large product base to a very diverse audience?”

The old way was to distribute millions of catalogs annually under numerous banners. But even though the company used the most eco-friendly paper, the massive waste wasn’t in line with its mission. Thus, the decision to slash catalog circulation by one-third, with a goal of more cuts in the future.

“When I first came on board in 2006, we were a catalog company that happened to have a website,” Moran says. “Now we are an e-commerce company with a greatly reduced catalog distribution. To better align with a core value of being environmentally responsible, it is imperative that we reduce landfill.”

Improving customer experience
Though many catalog subscribers were ultimately making their purchases online, the company had to “improve the customer experience on the Gaiam.com site” as catalogs were eliminated, Moran says. “We needed to make the website work even harder for us. With every site visitor being precious to us, the way we solve that is to have an exceptionally strong focus on conversion rate and obsessively monitor it.”

Partnering with MarketLive, a Petaluma, Calif.-based e-commerce software solution provider, has led to a better understanding of what website users were saying through their actions. Using the company’s Intelligent Insights platform, Gaiam has been able to delve more deeply into analytics.

“We had looked at the basic metrics on Gaiam.com, like unique visitors, where people are abandoning and conversion path, but felt like we weren’t using the analytics package to the fullest extent,” Moran says. “The MarketLive Intelligent Insights group helped us identify actionable data to help improve conversion rates and average order value. What we’ve seen come out of this is some pretty amazing wins.”

Gaiam’s most popular product, the BalanceBall Chair, is an inflatable exercise ball on a chair frame. During a typical workday, users can align the spine, tighten the core muscles and receive ergonomic back support. Because very little of this information was readily available on the website, however, the product had a high abandon rate.

“Based on recommendations MarketLive identified through the analytics, we worked with our editorial team to identify all the salient points,” Moran says. “We had an image of the BalanceBall chair, but were lacking images of how to use the chair and the parts of the body it helps improve. It’s not rocket science, but attention to that detail.”

Gaiam set a goal of improving sales 5 percent just by making simple improvements to the product page: sales actually jumped 30 percent. Now “we’re leveraging that BalanceBall chair win to additional products that need extra explanation” or demonstrations, Moran says.

Telling a story
To improve revenue performance, Gaiam needed to better utilize key space on the site, says Mark Pierce, CEO of MarketLive. “They let things encroach on the valuable real estate — the PayPal logo, HackerSafe logo, the things that could have been organized to build trust, but were negatively affecting the product,” he says. “They weren’t describing the story effectively. We’re seeing that across the board — it’s not about putting up a site and letting it operate. It’s an ongoing evaluation.”

Pierce believes that most e-commerce sites may see reports from analytics, but “tend to talk about the fact that they get reports, not the insights from those reports,” Pierce says. “They don’t get information that tells them what they need to be doing to restructure their site, to develop an ongoing evolution of the site.”

Pierce says Gaiam discovered one of the major trends in the evolution of e-commerce: Content is critical, not only to convert shoppers into customers, but also to drive search engine results.

“We serve mid-sized retailers,” he says. “They’re ‘niching’ against Walmart, Target. Authenticity … and voice of authority [are] a big deal to our merchant groups. They must be able to deliver content that targets these specific users with a relevant message. That message has to be supported with content, story lines and solutions that show they’re not just selling products, but serving the customer in an authentic way.

“The other half of that,” Pierce says, “is content co-merchandised with the right product has a huge impact on conversion, whether it is reviews, video, rich product imagery or textual descriptions.”

Content also offers a huge opportunity for search engine optimization, especially when Internet users may have simply been looking for information. That’s where Gaiam’s Life site functions best, Moran says. “It’s mainly an introduction … Gaiam Life is a hub for all of our different solutions. If they don’t know they need a product yet, we want to give them all the information that helps make their decision.”