Kate Somerville sees a 14% increase in revenue using Nosto and Guidance

About Kate Somerville

With over 25 years of experience in treating some of the most photographed faces in the world, the iconic skincare clinic (named after its founder) operates out of the heart of Hollywood. Kate Somerville’s products provide a visible skin transformation, formulated with highly functional active ingredients for maximum efficacy and balanced with soothing botanicals to reduce potential sensitivity concerns. With an emphasis on clinical skincare, advanced technologies, unparalleled service and proven results, Kate Somerville is a destination for anyone seeking real solutions to skin concerns.

The Challenge

Like most brands starting out as brick-and-mortar stores and later expanding into ecommerce, Kate Somerville needed to develop their digital presence while recreating consistencies in their customer interactions. Shopping for skincare products is unique to every person: the perfect product can depend on factors like gender, age, skin type, and ethnicity. In clinic, Kate’s specialists can help each shopper directly; the challenge was finding a similar way to engage customers on a 1:1 basis online. Struggling with outdated UIs, limited tracking, manual processes, and no personalization, Guidance and Nosto teamed up to help.

Guidance designed, built, and launched the Kate Somerville website on the Magento Commerce Enterprise Edition platform in early 2017. The robust flexibility of the Magento Commerce platform allowed Guidance to design a highly customized homepage featuring a combination of Product Recommendations, still and moving product visuals, and user testimonials. Kate Somerville was recognized as a finalist for a 2017 IRCE Excellence Award for Web Redesign of the Year in eCommerce.

The Solution

By onboarding Nosto, the brand was able to enhance both their home and category pages with data-driven Product Recommendations that inspired new visitors to convert. Meanwhile, returning visitors were targeted with recommendations that were based on a combination of browsing history, search, and purchase data.

Further to this, Nosto’s product recommendation template was customized to showcase products with a color-coded border for a more organised visual appear. Product descriptions were set up to expand upon hovering the product image, providing shoppers with necessary info. In addition, shoppers were given the ability to add product directly to cart from recommendations, streamlining the path to purchase.

In addition to their home and category pages, the brand sought to personalize their product pages too.

A customized product filter functionality was added to let the user filter products by ‘Skin Concern’, ‘Product Types’ and ‘Skin Types’, and fit all browsing methods.
The PDP dynamic layout was updated to include product descriptions covering benefits and ingredients, customer reviews and a persistent ‘add to bag’ feature.
Automatic cross-sell and up-sell product recommendations were added to inspire customers to shop further for similar or higher-valued items, increasing average order value and conversion.

In tackling their cart and checkout pages:

Product Recommendations were added to the cart page to display items most relevant to the ones the shopper is purchasing—driving last-minute purchases.
‘Ultimate Kate Rewards’, a customized customer rewards and loyalty program, was promoted using banners strategically placed on the cart and checkout page. This provided greater visibility of the program to encourage shoppers to join.

Nosto has been a great partner for us. We were able to see a significant lift in revenue/visitors when we A/B tested the solution vs manual selection. The results sealed the deal for us as we know for certain that we are getting return on the investment. You can’t say that about too many software solutions.

Sarah Zylstra, Director of Digital Marketing

The Results

Since going live with Nosto and Guidance, Kate Somerville has seen:

a 66% increase in valuable traffic
a 14% increase in revenue
a 16% increase in transactions
a 5% conversion rate on the PDP cross-sell recommendations

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