Scotch Malt Whisky Society

Scotch Malt Whisky Society Case Study

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society requires a continuous supply of Members to sustain its business model and relies on new visitors signing up regularly for memberships.

This means that sign up has to be frictionless.

We optimised key touchpoints of the user journey, removing obstacles and frustrations that were driving high drop-out rates from the account creation funnel.

Here’s how we did it.

The Client

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society is a whisky enthusiasts club that sells malt whisky from over 140 distilleries in Scotland directly to its members.

Founded in Edinburgh in 1983, it aims to celebrate the unique attributes of whisky drawn straight from the cask and unite enthusiasts from around the world.

The Objective

Identify and fix points of friction in sign up journey to drive more memberships from traffic landing on-site.

Using tools like Hotjar to identify exactly which elements of the form were creating difficulties for users, we devised a plan that focused on the following optimisations:

• In-page validation for all fields to reduce the number of failed submissions.
• Use of dropdowns rather than open entry fields, making the form easier to fill in.
• Automatically populating fields from previous entries, again helping users quickly fill in the form.

The Results

Our optimisations resulted in a streamlined sign-up process that make it easier for users to engage with.

• Conversion rate for users viewing the ‘Create Membership’ form increased by 21%
• The number of visitors progressing from the form page to Checkout increased by 1.5%
• These simple changes show SMWS an incremental £12K YoY

Why it Worked

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is the process of increasing the number of website visitors who take a desired action - whether that be filling out a form, downloading an asset, or making a purchase. This is achieved by ensuring that every element of your website is optimised to facilitate your core purpose.

In the case of SMWS, we identified that a significant number of users were abandoning the new membership journey at the ‘Create account’ stage, suggesting they were having difficulties with the form leading to unusually high drop-out rates.

While our fixes seem simple, they show combining analytics and user testing expertise gets results. Our data-driven approach allows us to hone in on the parts of a customer journey that are causing issues and make straightforward recommendations to fix them:

The Prefix field change reduced the number of times visitors needed to refill the field and made it easier for them to do so if they neglected to choose a prefix the first time around. Previously only 5% of users refilled at this stage, increasing to 11% after our recommendations were implemented.

Optimising the Preferred Name field lead to a ~50% decrease in the amount time users spent on this field, falling from 8.2 to 3.5 seconds.

Collectively, these straightforward improvements made the form more intuitive and easier to use for users, decreasing frustration and creating a frictionless journey to sign-up.

Optimising your website to facilitate the user journey is essential to improving your conversion rate.

Request a call and find out how our CRO team can make it easier for customers to use your site.