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Skinny Ties boosts mobile conversions +85%1 on their award winning responsive website by using the Mobify Predictive Resource Engine

+11%FASTER LOAD TIME

+85%CONVERSION RATE

+30%CTR ON CART TO

CHECKOUT

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Building the best

In early 2012, Stuart Sanft, CEO of Skinny Ties, approached Brendan Falkowski of Gravity Department to collaborate on the next generation of the Skinny Ties website.  Neither realized that Skinny Ties was about to generate an explosive reaction from Internet retailers and be seen as a pioneer of the Responsive Web Design (RWD) movement.  At the time, responsive web design was getting negative press and much of the criticism concerned the speed of web pages built using this technique. However, Falkowski knew that responsive web design “doesn’t have to be [slow] if you care about it.”  On his recommendation, Skinny Ties eschewed the traditional separate mobile website in favor of a complete responsive rebuild.

The rebuild required a complete overhaul of the architecture and content of the original Skinny Ties.  “Brendan stressed from day one how important that was,” Sanft disclosed.  “Every photograph I did I optimized the image quality and size to get the highest quality image at the smallest size.  We knew that the faster it loads, the more people stay with the site than abandon it.  We pushed that really hard.”

With a 63% smaller website and a refreshed design, the new Skinny Ties site was an instant success.  Considered the “vanguard of the responsive web design technique for Internet retailers”, Skinny Ties was showered with praise soon after its launch. Internet Retailer, Econsultancy, Creative Bloq, and others, ranked it as one of the best eCommerce sites in the US with comparisons to Microsoft, Disney, and even Amazon.

Background on Skinny Ties

Skinny Ties has been producing and selling neckties since 1971. In the early days of the Internet, they were one of the first companies selling traditional neckwear online, finding their niche in retro-style skinny ties. In mid 2014, SkinnyTies.com enabled the Mobify Predictive Resource Engine and immediately saw how reducing page load times positively impacted conversion rates and other key business metrics.

Number of transactions+ 57 %

Units sold+ 78 %

Average order value+ 21 %

Sales on desktop and laptop computers

+ 77 %

Sales on smartphones and tablets

+ 211 %

Android revenue+ 187 %

Sales through iPad+ 224 %

Revenue from iPhone+ 473 %

October 2011 - March 2012

vs

October 2012 - March 2013

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The next easy step

Even with the numerous optimizations built-in to the new Skinny Ties, each mobile visitor still experienced the same performance bottleneck that is present on every website - network latency.

To address this performance bottleneck, Skinny Ties selected the Mobify Predictive Resource Engine (PRE), which makes a website load faster on all devices, especially mobile phones with a high latency connection.  Through state-of-the-art machine learning technology that learns the behavior of visitors to a website, PRE recommends resources to load into the browser in advance.  This minimizes the effect of latency by reducing the number of new requests a visitor must make to view subsequent pages.

Developing this in house is far too big a job, according to Falkowski: “the best you can do is storyboard how you think users are going to move through the site and build a rudimentary manual prefetching system.” By relying on PRE to deliver personalized predictions for their customers, Skinny Ties does not have to make assumptions on how customers engage with their site, and no manual adjustments are needed when customers change their behavior due to sales, new product launches, or changes to the site’s navigation and features.

Skinny Ties found it easy to enable PRE: “Trivial is probably the best word to describe how difficult integrating PRE is,” remarked Falkowski.  “Since it’s literally just a <script> tag, we didn’t have to think about it...  The nice thing for us is that it’s an invisible change as well.  We can still build the site how we want, and PRE improves how users are actually using it after the fact.”

We knew that the faster it loads, the more people stay with the site than abandon it. STUART SANFT, CEO OF SKINNY TIES

“

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Trivial is probably the best word to describe how difficult integrating PRE is.

BRENDAN FALKOWSKI, FOUNDER OF GRAVITY DEPARTMENT

Unlocking an automated revenue boost

In the first month after enabling PRE, Skinny Ties enjoyed dramatic improvements to both performance and conversion rate. In a split-tested controlled experiment1, the median load time of each page decreased by 11%, and PRE drove a consistent 85% boost to conversion, and a 30% increase in the click-through rate from cart to checkout.

When discussing the results of the first month, “I was surprised that PRE had a noticeable bump in load times and how that affected conversion rate,” Falkowski remarked.  “It's well understood that improving performance will positively impact business metrics, but it can be hard to quantify.  The A/B testing that PRE provides made it easy to see the result with and without the service.”

This automatic A/B testing is integral to the functionality of PRE.  Beyond providing a baseline for which to compare the results, all predictions are also continuously tested to drive new, more accurate personalized predictions.  Through this constant iteration over subsequent weeks, PRE improved the load time by a further 19% and boosted the add-to-cart click-through rate a further 71%.

Since implementation of the Predictive Resource Engine, Skinny Ties has enjoyed an automatic, self-improving revenue boost.  “The nice thing about PRE,” states Falkowski, “is that it monitors automatically, and it figures out over time what was the right thing to do and what the right scenario is, and you can let that strategy fall out of your mind.  If you did that manually you’re going to have to re-evaluate it anytime you make a change to the site!”

Background on Mobify

Mobify is a mobile commerce platform used by leading enterprises to deliver exceptional responsive web and hybrid app shopping experiences, to drive accelerated business growth.  Mobify powers mobile shopping experiences for global retailers and brands.

Established in 2007, Mobify is based in Vancouver, Canada, and has a global network of resellers and implementation partners serving customers in North America, South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

1 Numbers reported are from August 1 through September 5, 2014. Results within this date range include all customers, segmented into

two groups: 50% PRE enabled vs 50% PRE disabled. Results are statistically significant with 95% confidence.