UrbanStems: Blooming Success in Ecommerce

6 Key Discussion Takeaways:

What kinds of ecommerce nuggets will you uncover by pressing that play button? Here's a shortlist of highlights:

• Adding video to a homepage, PLP, & other editorial content brings your products, engagement, & conversions to life
• Providing customers with 15 products is the magic number to show variety without the overwhelm
• Examine your audience & optimize your site for them by conducting A/B tests (and C/D while you're at it)
• Updating product names to be of-the-moment & reflect seasons, events, or holidays will boost their popularity
• Just before a holiday, cater to last-minute shopping urgency by removing frivolous content & displaying curated products
• Creating dedicated landing pages with content depicting the crossing of brands' stories will increase ROI on partnerships
  

In the wild jungle of ecommerce, staying ahead requires more than just a green thumb. It takes innovation, agility, and a knack for knowing what makes customers' hearts bloom. Enter UrbanStems, the cool kid on the floral block, who's been turning heads and winning hearts in the digital bouquet game.

We recently chatted with the brand’s Content Director, Katie Hudson, who spilled the tea on their journey, innovative strategies, and plans to continue harvesting ecommerce glory. Watch the video above for the full scoop, or keep reading for a few of the floral highlights!

From Seedling to Out-Standing

Picture this: You're in a panic because you forgot your anniversary (again) or your bestie just got a promotion and you need to send some love ASAP. That's where UrbanStems swoops in to save the day.

The brand began as a local floral delivery service in Washington D.C., offering same-day delivery of fresh, stylish bouquets. From these roots, the company has blossomed into a nationwide brand.

"We have an in-house florist who works on every collection to make sure it really
feels modern and unique. We really do feel like the urban side of UrbanStems is going to
become more and more important to us. And our photography and our creative
really kind of embodies that... the metropolitan city-feel of our designs."

Katie Hudson, Content Director, UrbanStems

What sets them apart? They're not your grandma's flower shop – they're a modern, stylish online florist that's revolutionizing how we gift flowers and plants. Think designer-crafted arrangements, farm-fresh blooms, chic plants, thoughtful gifts, and a user-friendly website that makes sending flowers easier than ordering a pizza.

Cultivating Brand Partnerships & Collabs

UrbanStems isn't just playing in the dirt; they're cultivating partnerships that would make even the fanciest roses blush. We're talking heavy hitters like Vogue and Bridgerton, people! These collaborations have allowed UrbanStems to offer premium, exclusive products and tap into new customer bases.

How are they managing these top-tier collabs? With cream-of-the-crop creativity and tech, of course...

"It was going to have to be a dev request to rebuild this whole Vogue landing page.
So finally, we said, ‘Alright, I think we can build this in Fastr’...
And then we ran ads to that page too. That's been really valuable for us.
And we are now able to use that landing page to build other brand partnerships."

Katie Hudson, Content Director, UrbanStems

UrbanStems leveraged Fastr Workspace to create a dedicated landing page for their Vogue partnership – one that told a brand story, felt editorial, and required no developers to produce or update with new products.

Having this page to drive traffic to not only helped the performance of their Vogue ads, but also served as a strategy and design flex that helped expand their partnership success to include Netflix’s hit series, Bridgerton.

Lights, Camera, Blossom!

UrbanStems is bringing their bouquets to life on the digital screen, and the results are blooming marvelous! When they first added video content to their homepage, it was like they'd discovered a new species of conversion-boosting flora. Conversion rates sprouted by 4% week over week, with customers spending more time on the UrbanStems site.

And the Fastr Workspace-fuelled ability to incporporate video content has planted a whole new seed in Hudson's digital strategy game: "We think education and video is going to be huge for us. Our product, while beautiful, can sometimes require some education around it. So that is something that we are going to be doing with our in-house floral designer – having him speak to the individual SKUs that we're going to be offering for the fall."

"We worked with Fastr to host, through Vimeo, a video on our homepage.
And then we saw a 4% increase in conversion rate week over week.
We, from there, knew we need to keep trying this."

Katie Hudson, Content Director, UrbanStems

Bouquet Blueprints: Perfecting Digital Arrangements

UrbanStems has mastered the art of both floral and Product List Page (PLP) arrangement. Through meticulous testing, they've discovered their magic number: 15 products per page. Not too sparse, not too crowded – just enough entice customers without overwhelming them.

Hudson and her team also created a bounce-reducing experience at the top of their landing pages. Leveraging Fastr Workspace, this experience pulls a showcase of products at a lower price point to flex the brand's product range – a smart tactic for specific landing pages with pricier products.

By fine-tuning their digital displays, UrbanStems has created a shopping experience that's as carefully crafted as their floral arrangements and welcomes shoppers with wide-ranging intents and budgets into their garden.

Seasonal Shifts, Adaptive Strategy

UrbanStems knows when and how to adapt their digital garden. Their seasonal strategies are as varied as their bouquets, ensuring they're always in full bloom.

For Mother's Day, UrbanStems experimented with different page layouts and content and video content proved to be the winning approach. "When we did the video on our landing page for all of our Meta ads before Mother's Day, that was converting much better than the other variants," Hudson reveals.

Valentine's Day brings a unique challenge: a predominantly male audience. "We are ~85% female most of the year, except for Valentine's Day," Hudson explains. Their solution? A simplified customer journey and curated product display for gift-hunters eager to pick, click, and cash in on holiday affection.

Even product names get a seasonal touch. An all-white peony bouquet renamed from "Pearl" to "Snow Peony" for winter saw "great improvement."

These agile adjustments allow UrbanStems to stay fresh, relevant, and blooming year-round.

Digital Fertilizer: Growing Success with Paid Ads

In the pay-to-play garden of digital advertising, UrbanStems is no wallflower. They've cultivated a strategy that's turning ad clicks into sales with impressive efficiency.

The secret to their success? Custom landing pages – fuelled by Fastr Workspace – that match their ad creatives, creating a seamless experience for customers coming from paid channels.

"We found in the past when we were driving to our homepage
from ads – or to just a PLP – the conversion rate was not doing
as well as when we made it a more seamless experience."

Katie Hudson, Content Director, UrbanStems

UrbanStems has also been experimenting with price point targeting, ensuring that the right products are shown to the right audience segments. This customer-journey-centric approach has led to improved performance across their paid channels.

Lessons from UrbanStems' Ecommerce Garden

UrbanStems' relentless experimentation has been key to their growth. The brand leaves no petal unturned in their weekly A/B testing where all page designs, layouts, content types, products, marketing tactics, and customer behaviors are all put under a microscope.

For many ecommerce brands, routine experimentation, and the agility to implement learnings on the turn of a dime is aspirational, but not realistic. So how does Hudson and her team pull it off?

Undeniable creativity, strategy, and a drive for optimization is a part of UrbanStems' experimentation culture. The brand's marketing and ecommerce teams work in tandem to drive digital improvements. And the development team? Not needed...

UrbanStems leverages Fastr Workspace – a powerhouse platform that empowers the brand's non-tech teams to ideate, design, deploy, test, analyze, edit, and optimize their digital content – no dev handoffs, holdups, or headaches stunting growth! Hudson and her team have complete creative flexibility, frontend control, and the tools to make data-informed decisions when crafting their digital presense.

As you tend to your own ecommerce garden, consider strategies and tools used by UrbanStems – a big-blooming brand that is consistently perfecting its green thumb and harvesting blooming success.

Read the UrbanStems case study to dig into more of the floral brand's journey, strategies, tests, and successes!