How A Fit Quiz Drives 10x Conversion Rate for Nudea

Nudea is a contemporary underwear brand, launched in September 2019.

One of the persistent challenges of women’s underwear, particularly bras, is finding the right fit.

CEO of Nudea Priya Downes has tackled this problem in a unique way.

While some of the initial pioneers in the DTC lingerie space, like ThirdLove and True & Co have found success with online fit finders, Priya has taken a slightly different approach.

In addition to the online fit finder, customers can purchase a physical tape measure. This serves as the equivalent of a “trip wire” that many internet marketers leverage–a lower priced item that gets greater commitment from customers that would otherwise be shopping on the website.

Those that purchase the measuring tape convert at 30% to purchasing a bra–that is 10x the normal user that converts at 3%.

Here are some of the highlights from the conversation with Prya, which you can listen to in its entirety here:

source: drapersonline

Can you describe Nudea for us? 

Nudea is a Direct To Consumer women’s intimates brand, based fundamentally on fit. We believe that women shouldn’t have to compromise. I started the company a couple of years ago, so it’s actually been in the works for quite a long time.

I founded the company with my talented Creative Director, Sophie Turnbull. She used to be Head of Design at Victoria’s Secret and has 25 years in the lingerie industry, which is very much a creative business, as much as it is engineering, as you can imagine.

We spent the first year and a half working with around 600 women just gathering lots of data. Our entire collection has been built off that initial off those initial workshops and that research.

We found, especially in the UK was that women were faced with the challenge of getting really boring, basic underwear that is cheap. And over the years, the quality has really diminished, it’s boring, it’s not exciting and not very modern. We think that there’s a lot of room for the lingerie industry to move online.

Women usually tend to buy bras in person. They are four times more likely to purchase a bra when they’ve been fitted.

And yet that fitting experience is still the dark ages of being in physical retail.

So one of our biggest Unique Selling Propositions is offering women the chance to get fitted and purchase from home.

And that’s basically what we do. We have invented our own tape measure. It makes it really easy for women to size up at home. You just sort of measure yourself and you are what you say on the zones.

So actually we’ve seen a massive surge of sales online, but also the number were people using all fitting tools. Our tape measure has seen a 500% increase, like pre to post COVID month on month. And it’s growing massively. So, just in the month of July, we sold over a thousand tape measures, and 30% of those tape measure purchases are converting and buying bras.

source: Nudea

Can you elaborate on the conversion rates?
The average conversion from browsing traffic on our website is around 3%.

Our tape measure conversion is around 30%. So 30% of people who buy a tape measure to start their fit journey with us, ended up coming back to us to actually buy a bra. So it’s a really good investment, from us as a, from a brand point of view, because, the more tape measures we get in the hands of people, the more likely we’re going to get them to come back to us.

And the same goes for our online fit finder.

I think once a customer has invested in taking the quiz, they’re, they’re clearly curious about their size, and they’re more engaged and likely to convert.

So certainly, investing in fitting tools is a really great way to engage customers, and also helps with returns because if  people are sizing up ahead of buying, then they’re more likely to get their right size the first time around.

So it’s it’s definitely worth it.

Like we see that with our tape measure and our fit finders fit, find participants that those that actually use the sizing tools to size up have a lower return rate, and tend to spend more because they trust the sizing.

So the average order values are, for our tape measure, for example is about 23% higher than browsing traffic.

Does the extra step that customers have to go through impact conversion rates?

So you can see it’s definitely worth investing in these tools. many people might say, well, it’s a little bit of an extra step in conversion.

Yes. But I think you definitely get more engaged and more loyal and it ends up paying forward.

How did you come up with the questions to the quiz?

You have to think about what are they going to feel comfortable answering? So things like asking somebody to enter their weight as, as much as that might be relevant, to giving them a better product recommendation that might not be such a great, a very warm question to ask somebody.

So, it’s about getting the balance of what do you really need to give them the best size recommendations at best product recommendation and balancing that against what actually is realistic for people to answer and answer accurately.

Can you describe like how you’re using the data points that you’re gathering in the seven questions, as it relates to the email marketing or your remarketing campaigns?

We have these two fitting journeys and they’re actually quite different from a CRM point of view.

So, the fit finder (ie the measuring tape), and the online fit finder’s obviously the easiest because it’s all digital and it’s all data that we get live and it’s all recorded.

So, for us, that’s easy because we’ve got the customer’s email and we’ve got the customer’s data points.

For our tape measure, it’s a little bit more complicated because obviously somebody gets a tape measure and they don’t necessarily come back right away. And actually we find that the 30% of people that do convert off the tape measure tend to come back within four to six weeks.

So 75% of those people come back within four to six weeks and after six weeks we basically lost them.

So one of the things that we have to get, I think we want to get better at is making sure that we close the loop with that. So, that we’re able to better capture those, that customer’s data.

So,  if that customer sizes up, we don’t necessarily have visibility of what size they have. So one of the things that we are actually looking to do is to potentially make a hybrid fit finder. So basically,  a customer gets the tape and then they come back to us online and actually inputs their size.

And then we ask them a couple of additional questions that we could. We could basically offer them a product recommendation. and that’s something that’s going to be probably version 2.0, is looking at sort of a way that we can optimize the best of those, because we do find that the tape measure is.

source: Nudea

Challenges with Facebook: Have you identified like what your main channel is or are you still at a point of testing? What might work and what their outcomes might be?

When we initially launched, we were very focused on paid: paid ad spend on Facebook and Google. And actually I think that we were wrong, because we weren’t getting the returns that we were expecting. And there’s many reasons for that.

I think that the general gist of the, of the DTC world is that Facebook marketing has become hugely competitive and customers are a little bit more numb to just straight ads that they see on Facebook and Instagram.

The biggest challenge for us and what we learned is that Facebook is there’s this element of nudity that they screen. So a lot of our content doesn’t work on Facebook.

So we quickly, started to have a bit of a broader marketing mix. And actually one of the areas that we didn’t think was going to be big for us, but turned out to be huge is PR.

PR has been massively valuable for us, has, has influences. And I think that there are many influences out there that won’t necessarily wear lingerie, but there are many influence,r many engaged influences about body image. Or they love our story.

With lingerie, people respond to social proofing. So if somebody tells them, “Oh, this is a great brand, please try it.” Whether that comes from a press publication or whether it comes from an influencer or a friend, that ends up being more powerful for us than say a straight ad.