Kendra Scott’s analytics team delivered 20 impactful tests in 2024 that drove millions in incremental revenue for the brand. The VP of digital shares how.
A better customer experience can add millions in incremental revenue to a retailer’s bottom line. Just ask Kamanasish Kundu, vice president and head of digital and ecommerce at Kendra Scott.
Kundu is constantly monitoring the performance of KendraScott.com and looking for ways to improve the customer experience at the jewelry brand manufacturer. And it does that through having a user friendly analytics tool and the right employees dedicated to using it.
“Any successful organization, you can have the most powerful tool, but if you don’t have the experts who knows how to use those tools, it’s pointless,” Kundu said.
Kendra Scott uses digital analytics platform Contentsquare as its main user experience analytics tool and has 30 unique active users on the platform. But it wasn’t always like this. Since Kundu joined Kendra Scott two years ago, he has actively worked to create and strengthen the brand’s analytics teams.
Kundu hired a senior director of analytics as well as invested in technical analysts and strategic web merchandisers. Now, multiple Kendra Scott teams use Contentsquare, and more of its organization has a data-centric mindset, he said. In 2024, Kendra Scott’s team pulled 2,000 unique insights from Contentsquare, which was a 200% increase over 2023, he said.
Kundu, who goes by “KK,” sat down with Multichannel Marketer and discussed how Kendra Scott approaches changing the customer experience on its site, specific examples of tweaks that increased its conversion and added millions in incremental to its bottom line.
MM: Can you give me a few of the examples of changes that you did that really improved the site experience?
KK: One of the examples I can share is, on the mobile website, when you go into a product listing page, you see product images, and then we had a swipe feature. Based on some of the advice of customer feedback, we heard that customers don’t even realize that they could swipe for the product images because there’s no visual indicator. We noticed that also in the Contentsquare data that there is less utilization. We leveraged the zoning analysis from the Contentsquare tool to validate some of the voice of customer feedback that the users are completely unaware of the swipe functionality.
Fast forward, the team added visual indicators on product listing page product images to signal additional product images. The team monitored the engagement of that feature and then conducted a comparison. We ended up seeing almost a 60% increase in swipe rate for the product listing. And again, those are small changes that can make massive impact in terms of the overall customer experience and overall conversion.
MM: This was on mobile, yes?
KK: Yes, when you typically go on desktop, when you hover over the image, it changes, but then on mobile, you can’t do that, right? Hover over functionality doesn’t exist, so it has a swipe functionality. We also started seeing people are adding to bag more directly from the PLP page other than going into the product digital page, and it’s just removing the overall friction.
MM: What percent add to bag increase? Did you notice any increase in conversion?
KK: If I think about all the different tests which we did where we have leveraged a data-driven approach, we typically drive around 1-2% conversion lift for the business through different UX improvements. In the grand scheme of things, it is pretty large. We’re talking in millions in incremental revenues because those 1% touch points on a sizable ecommerce business is very a big lift.
MM: 1 to 2% is a huge increase in conversion.
KK: I was saying cumulatively. If you think of a business as a baseline of 100, we are typically driving 1-2% and overall conversion lift on top of the baseline, which is in millions, which is very sizable.
Some of the tests we’re going to fail. How do we learn from those? Why did it fail? And then some of the tests are going to have really positive results. But net, on an average, we’re delivering that kind of growth.
MM: How do you use Contentsquare to inform any digital marketing decisions?
KK: When it comes to digital marketing, we always try to see how the customers are interacting in the channel, and is there anything different we need to do in terms of the experience. If you see that some of the pages where digital marketing team is driving traffic, we are seeing higher bounce rates or people are not engaging.
One of the examples is for our loyalty program, where customers get a discount on the month of their birthday. We have a landing page experience there. All the traffic which is coming from our digital channels to encourage people to sign up and get the benefit. What we did is, we just pushed the value proposition above the fold in a very simple way, so that customers can understand here’s what you get. That had a dramatic impact in overall conversion. We saw a dramatic increase in terms of incremental revenues coming from the customer acquisition.
MM: Do you remember how much that increase was?
KK: It was close to $1 million in incremental revenue just from one simple test.
MM: How long are your tests?
KK: I would say two to four weeks is a sweet spot for most tests, but there might be some exceptions.
We have a process where we do pre-testing before doing a test to understand, okay, so do we have enough sample size to run a test? If it passes the pre-testing, then we initiate a test. Typically, we try to wrap up a test within four weeks.
Ultimately, we try to aim for 95% significance level to conclude a test so that it’s statistically significant.
MM: How many tests do you have running at one time?
KK: We have a different philosophy in testing. So we are not like Amazon, where we have hundreds of tests we are going to run at the same time. What I can share is that we delivered 20 impactful tests last year and that drove millions and millions of dollars for the business. It’s more quality over quantity, that’s all.
So find the business problems we want to solve, or find the pockets of opportunities looking at the data, and then go big on those pockets. In a certain week there can be five tests running; there can be 10 tests running. That’s not the most important goal we have in mind. The most important goal is that we have a certain percentage sales lift goals in the team, which we want to hit. We want to go after really big tests, which are going to move the needle.
MM: Looking ahead to 2025, what’s on your radar? Any big challenges?
KK: We’re going to be focused on the fundamentals of the business. There’s been a lot of noise around AI revolution, a lot of things happening every week in that space. But we are going to stay grounded in terms of the business opportunities we have: That is mobile. We are going to have a mobile first step approach. We are going to amplify personalization and bring that omnichannel experience. Kendra Scott is a personal brand with around 150 stores and a vibrant ecommerce channel. We believe in doing good for the society. We have philanthropy, fashion and family. Those are our pillars.
We have tested a lot of things last year. How do we scale some of it, right? Keep on building that stronger baseline and then on top, introduce new initiatives. Then keep beating the benchmark and outperforming everyone we can think of. That’s the goal.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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