Improving Cabela’s holiday sales experience

How I increased holiday sales for Cabela’s.

Project Details

Redesigning Cabela’s holiday shopping landing page to increase engagement and boost sales during the busiest time of the year.

  • Client:

    Cabela’s

  • Challenges:

    Enhance time-on-site and increase overall sales for Cabela’s online store during the Thanksgiving to Christmas season.

  • Deliverables:

    Holiday online shopping experience

  • Skills:

    User Interface Design, User Experience Strategy, Creative Direction, Visual Communication

Sales improved by 8.33% from the previous year

Background Info

The vice president of digital marketing sought to increase sales during the holiday season, specifically targeting Thanksgiving and Black Friday. Tasked with redesigning the holiday promotions landing page, me and my user interface team collaborated with the user experience (UX) team to create an engaging, efficient design that would captivate users and guide them toward completing purchases.

Phase 1: Define the Problem

To maximize sales during the holiday season, Cabela’s needed a landing page that could hold users’ attention longer and facilitate faster navigation to deals, especially during high-traffic events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We wanted to look into and improve:

Project Goals & KPIs

Enhance Customer Shopping Experience

  1. Improve usability
  2. Help customer find the deals they are looking for faster

KPIs: Category awareness

Increase Sale

  1. Streamline access to holiday promotions
  2. Increase time-on-site and conversion rates

KPIs: time-on-site

Phase 2: Strategy & Approach

Initial Research

Starting with customer surveys and interviews conducted by the UX team, we analyzed user behavior to identify key improvements. Initial findings showed the navigation to the left was being over looked. Customers struggled looking through over 200 deals that changed daily.

Concept

I came up with a simple solution to put in a prominent sub-category navigation to help users find desired categories quickly, replacing the previous multi-page layout that could cause users to lose track of promotions.

Final Mock

The creative started with a planned photoshoot. As the art director, I worked with our in house photography and styling team. For the shoot. Everything, from the outfit, colors, model, beard, and lighting was specifically chosen for this shoot. I also worked with our team of merchants to showcase specific products for this season.

Initial Research & Concept
Final Mock

Phase 3: How it went

User Interface & Experience Testing

With the UI concept in place, my team collaborated with the UX team to implement a cohesive experience, testing the design with eye-tracking and moderated user interviews. This new layout focused on maintaining a user-friendly navigation bar that highlighted popular subcategories without overwhelming users.

Left Navigation Testing

Users focused on the left navigation but were unclear on where it would lead.

Main Sales Page with Sub-Navigation Testing
Hunting Sub-Navigation Testing

Testing the sub-navigation showed the users spent more time looking through the page and the products. Which is a goal of the project.

The users also showed a clear understand of the sub-navigation intention and quickly found deals related to desired topics.

Visual Branding Refresh

Part of the project expanded to concepting new design styles for the holiday sales. To visually mark the different weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we designed holiday-themed covers for Cabela’s promotional materials, each themed with distinct colors to represent specific weeks. The refreshed design targeted a younger demographic, aiming to increase visual appeal and engagement with the holiday deals.

The Results

In the end, we only moved forward with the sub navigations within the holiday sales pages. Following the redesign, Cabela’s saw a notable increase in user engagement metrics:

Category Awareness

User testing indicated increased awareness and interaction with targeted holiday categories.

Time-on-Site

Enhanced navigation led to a measurable increase in average time-on-site.

Sales Growth

Online holiday sales exceeded previous years’ performance, making the campaign a success and validating the effectiveness of the new design strategy.

Adding the sub-navigation led to Cabela’s highest online holiday sales to date.

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