Borsalino Eyewear — a UX case study
Borsalino is an eyewear company from Argentina that was looking to improve the results of its digital marketing efforts.
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🎯 Goals
- Increase brand awareness
- Boost sales
⚠️ Challenges
Borsalino clients are not the end customers, but the stores that later sell the glasses to them.
The website conversion rate was determined by a form that the user had to fill in in order to receive an email (manually written) with the list of stores near his/her location that sell Borsalino .
This process required a lot from the user who (even if he/she overcomes the natural resistance to complete a form) is forced to wait for a response. That waiting is an incentive to look for a similar product of another brand or to simply lose interest, because the longer it takes to actually make the purchase, the less likely it will ever be made.
The complete list of stores is not shown publicly on the website to preserve a good relationship with the client. If the stores were to be listed alphabetically, for example, a store which name starts with “Z” could argue that Borsalino is damaning its sales in relation to another one from the same area which name starts with “A”, and stop buying from Borsalino in retaliation.
What if there was an alternative to automatically show users the nearby stores without risking having problems with the client?
💡 Solutions
A holistic approach
All the parts needed to work in tandem to achieve the goals.
Borsalino already had presence in social media but was not on Instagram yet. Adding it into the strategy was a decision that was taken almost instantly because:
- up to 70% of its total activity is related to the fashion industry
- 72% of users claim they have decided to buy a fashion/beauty product after having seen it in a post
Through a combination of organic reach, paid ads, and deals with influencers, posts on social media would increase the brand awarness and bring traffic to the new website, where users would get information on where to buy Borsalino.
A cohesive design language
Taking into consideration that most of the traffic to the website would come after a first interaction with the brand in social media (intuition that turned out to be valid, with 60% acquisition by this channel), it was key to create consistency between all the different digital platforms.
Even if it happens subconsciously, users notice when a brand works to achieve visual consistency across all its media. It conveys the type of trust that helps to make a buying decision and, through the repetition of both visual and behivoral patterns, creates a more intuitive experience.
A product catalog respectful of user’s time
In many eyewear websites, it is necessary first to browse through small thumbnails of all the products, select one of them and access a new page to only then be able to see the whole set of pictures in high resolution.
Borsalino agreed to try a different approach and create an experience that is respectful of user’s time: zooming the pictures would still be possible, but not mandatory. All the products (including color variants) would be available in an optimal size and in the same page.
To make this possible, a minimalist interface was implemented. It does not get in the way, turns the products into the main protagonists and allows the campaign photos to set the general visual tone.
The use of white space provides an easy way to distinguish and examine each product and makes them the real protagonists. Extra UI elements and colors appear only to highlight the selected product to avoid the website looking overloaded.
The minimalist nature of the website also responds to an important requirement: it has to be easy to update. Since the campaign photos change every six months, they need to be fit the design seamlessly, regardless of their new artistic direction.
Speaking of the campaign photos, they are not part of the design only for aesthetics reasons. It is a fact that good pictures can boost sales. This was proven after programming events that collect data on the website usage. It was discovered that products that are shown on the campaign photos are indeed the most clicked.
Fast load time
In order to respect user’s time the website also needed to load fast, a task that initially seemed to be an obstacle to the idea of showing high resolution pictures of all the products at the same time.
Following the general trend on the internet since 2016, most traffic came from mobile devices, and if Instagram was going to be important in the new strategy, visits from this smartphones would only increase even more, — prediction that was later proven to be true: they grew from 50% to 70% — .
Adding to the fact 3G networks in Argentina are the slowest in the region, making the website as lightweight as possible was set as a priority.
The glasses usually have 3 color variants each, and only the first image must be loaded by default at the start. The solution was to load the second and third option exclusively when the user requested it. That way the initial load size of the website turned out to be only 1.1 MB.
A geolocation-based store locator
Instead of the old contact form, a store locator was added. It does not list the optics alphabetically or under an arbitrary parameter set by Borsalino, but based on the distance from the user’s current location.
An elegant solution solves several problems at once. In this case, using geolocation to list the nearby stores, not only deactivates any risk of conflict with the client, but delivers the information instantly, instead of killing the buying urgency by making the user wait for an email response.
Also, this feature is new a selling point for Borsalino to pitch to its clients. While other brands with their own retailers get consumers away from the multi-brand stores, Borsalino does the exact opposite.
Borsalino social media channels are focused first on increasing brand awareness and subsequently providing a easy way to access the store locator.
On Facebook, a prominent call to action is included at the end of the “product of the week” photo slideshow.
On Instagram, users can access the store locator through a highlighted Instagram Story.
On Twitter, when users want to know more about the brand after seeing a picture of a influencer or journalist that wearing Borsalino, there is pinned tweet always at the top with a direct link to the store locator.
👏 Results
The traffic to the website increased by +80%, the conversion rate went up by +200% and Borsalino reaches an audience almost 8 times larger than before for a fraction of the money that was investing in advertisement.
Borsalino also receives a monthly report with metrics about the most popular products and posts to identify trends that can help to make business decisions based on hard data from its audience, leaving the guesswork to a minimum.
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