Highlights for Children boosts subscription conversions.

Understanding digital journeys of direct mail leads.

Highlights for Children, a beloved global media brand for over 75 years, focuses on helping families raise curious, creative, caring, and confident kids. As Director of Digital Operations, Ryan Hohman manages the team responsible for the user experience on highlights.com. Recognizing the importance of a seamless online journey, particularly for converting direct mail leads into loyal subscribers, Ryan sought a solution to gain deeper visibility into customer behavior.

Pinpointing friction in the order process.

To gain a deep understanding of user behavior, the team implemented comprehensive tracking of key metrics, including conversion rate (CVR), units per transaction (UPT), bounce rate, and average order value (AOV), specifically for traffic originating from their fall gift direct mail campaign. Custom dashboards provided a centralized view of this data, allowing for continuous monitoring.

However, quantitative data alone wasn't enough. To truly understand why users were or weren't converting, the team heavily utilized Quantum Metric's session replay feature. This allowed them to see firsthand the experiences of users navigating the order form, identifying moments of frustration, confusion, or technical difficulties that led to abandonment. These real user sessions provided rich context that went beyond simple analytics.

Uncovering a multi-million dollar checkout anomaly.

One of the most significant impacts of leveraging Quantum Metric was the identification of a long-standing checkout error. Initially dismissed as a general platform issue, Ryan noticed the error resurfacing during peak holiday traffic, coinciding with a surge in customer complaints reported by the care team. By using Quantum Metric to replay sessions of affected customers and comparing timestamps with backend logs, they uncovered that one of their three checkout servers had been blacklisted by their order management system (OMS) for a staggering 23 months—multi-millions of dollars in cost.

This revelation not only led to the immediate resolution of the critical error but also triggered a comprehensive audit of their system monitoring tools and QA playbooks, solidifying Quantum Metric's importance within the organization.

Faster issue resolution and proactive optimization.

The insights gleaned from Quantum Metric dashboards and session replays were regularly shared during product discovery sessions and incorporated into voice-of-the-customer reports. This ensured that user experience data directly informed the product roadmap and the prioritization of bug fixes and new features. Furthermore, proactive alerts were configured to notify the team immediately if critical metrics dipped below established baselines, enabling rapid response to potential issues.

Ryan and his team also recognized the power of quantifying the impact of identified friction. By presenting not only the issues but also the potential impact on conversion rates and annual opportunity, coupled with session replays, he helped other teams understand the value and prioritize these findings. This data-backed approach proved crucial in securing internal buy-in and resources for key enhancements.

Impact:

• Multi-million revenue opportunity identified: Identification and resolution of a critical, long-term checkout server issue prevented significant ongoing revenue loss.
• Significant conversion uplift: A 6.4% increase in conversion rate for the 2024 Fall Gift Campaign demonstrates the effectiveness of data-driven optimizations.
• Accelerated issue resolution: Reducing error identification and resolution time to just one day allows for a more responsive and improved customer experience.
• Enhanced cross-functional collaboration: Sharing Quantum Metric insights fosters empathy and alignment across different teams, leading to more effective problem-solving.
• Data-driven prioritization: Quantifiable data on user friction and potential revenue impact enables the team to prioritize optimization efforts effectively.