Data and Design Help Homeschooling Marketing Leader Double Sales for Flagship Product

AOP Doubles Sales for Flagship Product Using Data and Design

Business is more data-driven now than at any other time in history. While there’s a fundamental art in our marketing work, we now also have science to support and guide our ideas and actions. That means we have the opportunity and responsibility to bring data into our business decision-making – and that includes the front-end of our business. Read on to see how AOP did it.

AOP, the market leader in homeschooling, raised conversion rates by over 90% with the launch of their new online store – all by paying attention to consumer patterns.

With North America’s growth in alternative learning, Alpha Omega Publications (www.aop.com) was seeing the rise of a new customer segment. This emerging group was different from AOP’s loyal base because they didn’t already know AOP had led the evolution of homeschool education from traditional, print, self-directed learning and online academies.

Instead, this new group was navigating a growing list of choices for their children’s education. Essentially, a 60-year history of leadership was irrelevant. To this segment, AOP was just another option. With this new market force in play, AOP’s online store had to change.

Where did we start? Everywhere.

With only 18 weeks until the back-to-school shopping season, the team began design on two fronts. With the help of leadership at AOP, CQL Design and Strategy worked to hone the pathways-to-purchase, and our Ecommerce Development team developed a new CMS platform, connections to Dynamics GP, and Azure cloud deployment.

Net it out? There is truth in the data.

AOP leadership and CQL were aligned: There is truth in data. In marketing, this truth is found in analytics. The magic happened when we found the patterns in the analytics that drove how we designed an intuitive user journey. Said another way, ‘digging into the numbers’ informed our design thinking on how to create a joyous, intuitive path to purchase. (And it worked.)

The results speak for themselves.

While it’s every marketer’s dream to measurably grow a business, AOP’s results were more than that. They showed what can happen when an entire enterprise recognizes the deep connection between strategic marketing, experience design, and the technical platform that delivers them. 

For AOP, better understanding of consumer behaviors (by the numbers) delivered happier customers, improved site performance, and had a business engine running on our favorite fuel—growth.

Today, AOP’s flagship product is experiencing triple digit growth. Ecommerce conversion rates across all platforms (desktop, mobile, and tablet) are up double digits with the overall site conversion up 50%. With new campaigns everyday, these numbers increase thanks to the store’s landing pages, built into the site by intentional design.

Is everything perfect at AOP.com? Are we done?

Of course not. Business (and ecommerce in particular) is a journey and there is always further to go.

The team has worked hard to get here and we can celebrate that success. Every day, we use the data to examine, analyze, and optimize their customers’ experiences.

We’re better today, and so are the millions of AOP customers, because of the truth in data.