Camping World

200% revenue boost and 83% conversion lift with this approach
Client: 
Affinity Group
Project: 
UX Survey panel, Expert Review, Rapid Wireframes

The Story

Affinity Group's Camping World website needed to convert more visitors to new customers. Users needed to quickly understand the value of the site and how it worked. The new site design needed to accommodate the following user experience objectives:
  • Make searching for a vehicle on the Camping World website incredibly easy in order to strengthen the overall value proposition.
  • Create an intuitive self-serve process (post and manage vehicle details).
  • Increase the subjective satisfaction of the site with relation to search functionality, brand identity, pricing and ease of use.
  • Increase understanding of the site's benefits for the 240,000 monthly visitors who were looking and leaving.
  • Increase conversion rates by anything!

The Challenge

Affinity Group had two simple tasks it wanted users to perform on the website: search and consumer listing sales. In order for that to happen, users had to successfully interact with search features, validate search results, view vehicle details, explore service details and then sign-up. Since Affinity Group was redesigning its look and feel (including a new logo), it was imperative to include users in the early redesign stages to not only learn about their preferences, but also to build loyalty and awareness for the new site launch. Using our powerful online survey, we launched interactive interviews utilizing "logic branching" to probe deeply in areas of interest. The survey asked users to vote on new logos, to describe ideal pricing structures and identify potential features, content and layout that would motivate them to purchase. In three days 750 opt-in responses were returned and results instantly delivered to the development team.

"Experience Dynamics helped us to see how our users thought about our new design ideas and what areas of importance we needed to fix in a short time frame. In three weeks we saw a 33% jump in revenue on the site from the pricing analysis piece alone".
- David Scifres, VP Internet Services, Affinity Group

The Turning Point

Users were pleased they were being included in the redesign effort and opt-ed in to join an advisory panel. Affinity Group's developers were glad to get real-time feedback from the users directly. At the same time, we conducted a competitive usability analysis of features, functionality and assessed 'ease of use' of top competitor sites in order to determine usability requirements for the site.

The Execution
We worked closely with the Camping World internal development team who were designing the site to steer them toward usability best practices and provided ad-hoc expert reviews to optimize search, log-in and vehicle details screen layouts. Experience Dynamics provided rapid mock-ups of content and page layouts. When iterations were complete, Experience Dynamics went back to the survey opt-in panel to ask them about alternative layouts for the home page, search pages and product detail page content and features. Again 70% response rates from the online surveys meant that strategic decisions about search functionality and results, for instance, were made quickly and with statistical significance.
The Results
  • Real-time user surveying provided a continuous pulse of input to an Agile “instant UX results” development process.
  • The site saw 33% increase in revenue in 30 days later jumped to 200% increase in revenue over 12 months.
  • Affinity Group added a record number of new dealers to the dealer-listing program just four months after launch.
  • The site saw an 83% increase in customer conversion rate.
  • After the first year the site went from a no-starter to netting over $1M in revenue from the redesign effort.
    "With Experience Dynamics help, we were able to get fast answers to important questions about what users thought, what was important to them and even their impression of design mock-ups. Beyond yes/no answers, we gained in-depth insight into what our customers thought about the new design, what they liked/disliked and why, and what information was critical to them." - David Scifres, VP Internet Services, AGI