case study

Nurturing new BULQ account users to reduce time from sign-up to first purchase by over 50%

BULQ is a subsidiary of Optoro that was created to reinvent wholesale liquidation and enable sustainability for retailers by giving their returned and excess inventory a second life. BULQ sells returned items from Optoro’s trusted retail customers to resellers of all sizes and provides support, education, and resources to anyone looking to start or scale their reselling business. 

Reselling, also known as retail arbitrage or flipping, is often adopted out of desperation to make money. However, it can be a very risky practice due to the inconsistency and inaccuracy of items from other liquidation sources — most of whom don’t offer any kind of support or guarantees to their customers, putting them at risk of losing money.

What sets BULQ apart is its offer of a 98% manifest guarantee, easy shipping, and a dedicated customer care team. TLDR: BULQ is the most reliable, easiest place to buy inventory for reselling. 

Among the many complexities of the reverse supply chain, one of the most business-critical is being able to move and resell liquidation inventory quickly — for financial and space-related reasons. Due to this, the BULQ marketing team was presented with a challenge.

Data showed that once a new BULQ customer made their first purchase, they would make their second within a few days. However, it took over two weeks for a new user to make their first purchase. 

The challenge: How might we decrease the time between a new user signing up and making their first purchase to improve inventory velocity and build customer loyalty?

We hypothesized that if we wanted them to buy from us more quickly, then we needed to find a way to quickly build trust. Many resellers are incredibly wary of liquidation sources (and corporations in general), but we were up for the challenge.

research and planning

While doing product-focused research on the overall new customer experience, one of BULQ’s UX designers discovered an email in our post-purchase flow that was chock-full of the kind of information that resellers should know BEFORE they buy from BULQ.

Using this as our jumping-off point, we decided that we should revamp the customer onboarding email journey to give new users the information and support they may need.

my role

I led the design and development processes and collaborated closely with the Director of Brand, Performance Marketing, and UX

design

user testing

project management

content and design

I led the charge of collaborating across UX, brand, and performance marketing to determine our audience segmentation, customer journey, and content strategy for the email series. We took the opportunity to surface content the team had been building for months, like blog posts and new brand videos, to provide them with resources and showcase the humanity behind the brand.

I used this email series as the foundation for experimenting and establishing styles for the BULQ brand refresh I was working on at the same time. I designed a few iterations and dove into my first experience with user testing to validate the content flow, collect feedback, and understand perception of the refreshed brand identity.

user testing

While the user feedback was generally positive for both the content and design, I identified a few areas across the series to reduce the amount of information and create additional opportunities for customers to feel connected to the brand.

outcomes

The welcome email series went live in February of 2019, and BULQ saw the average number of days to first purchase (after new account creation) reduced from 15 days to 4 days between February and the end of 2019. Within 2 weeks of launching, the average was reduced from 15 days to 6 days — more than a 50% reduction almost immediately — resulting in not just an increased number of sales, but an increase in AOV as well.

lessons learned

Teamwork makes the dream work.

I was brand new to BULQ when we started this project, and I quickly learned an incredible amount from the teams about building maps, creating clear documentation, and understanding roles and responsibilities across UX, brand, and marketing. We applied these principles and processes across the brand over the last few years to elevate the BULQ customer experience.

Build for the future.

There were a few key things that came up as we worked that have set the team up for efficiency and scalability:

  • We used this opportunity to start building triggered emails using HTML — previously, emails had all been built using images which was impacting deliverability and created accessibility issues. 

  • When we kicked off, there was no existing system for content collaboration across marketing and design. I built a template for the marketing team to input the copy that would be used for design. I also structured the template so that each section was broken out by HTML style so that whoever was coding the email could do it efficiently.

  • Through this process, we were able to build templates and processes for new designers to onboard more efficiently in the future.