$1.5M
Added Revenue
+20%
Gross Profit Margin Lift
1 Week
To First Results
"If you are finding yourself in a place where you're leaving growth on the table — Teodor and his team are exceptional at going in there and really just finding what needs to be fixed and just hammering away at it. We set goals in terms of what we wanted to see in a certain timeframe and that was exceeded well before the original deadline. I think it was less than a month before we hit the first goals that we had set together. I have no regrets at all and I look forward to continue working with them."
— James Nichols, Co-Founder, US Park Pass
US Park Pass sells an annual pass to America’s national parks. Demand was huge and revenue was decent, but the profit margin on the pass was only about 8%.
That’s too low to grow on, so before anything else we had to fix the bottom line.
The way in was the rest of the store. Water bottles, guides and blankets all had higher margins than the pass. If people bought one of those with their pass, each order would be worth more. So that’s where we started.
We didn’t want to guess what to change first, so we put a survey on the thank you page: “What almost stopped you from buying today?” 431 people answered, and 31% said shipping cost.
We couldn’t just drop shipping, because that would have cut an 8% margin even further. So we offered free shipping over $100. The pass cost about $80, which meant people only had to add $20 of higher-margin products to get it.
We tried it in the cart drawer first, because it sits close to the purchase and you see results faster. A progress bar at the top showed how close people were to free shipping. We added related products and a low-cost gift packaging option, payment badges as a trust seal, and one checkout button, so we could capture emails and cross-sell in the checkout.
Profit per order went up 21%.
That told us the offer worked, so we did more of it. We looked at their Shopify data to see what people were already buying with the pass, and turned those combinations into bundles with free shipping included. The bundles did so well that they got their own Bundle & Save collection.
Then we looked for other places to show an extra product. We added frequently bought together on product pages, right below the button. In the checkout, two static product suggestions worked best. After the purchase, we showed one product on the first screen and several on the second.
We labeled these “others also bought”, so they felt helpful and not pushy.
With profit per order moving, we turned to conversion rate. To sell more passes we needed to know why people bought them, so we asked: “What main benefit were you looking for when buying an Annual Park Pass?”
We left the question open so we wouldn’t steer the answers, and 2,176 people replied. The top reason was gifting at 20.17%, ahead of access and convenience at 14.84%.
We didn’t expect that. You’d think people buy this pass for themselves, but about one in five answers was about gifting. So we added a gifting ideas collection to the menu, built bundles for gifting, and started running email campaigns and flows around gift ideas.
The next clue came from on-site polls and session recordings. People were stuck in a loop, looking for the list of parks, and it wasn’t in the menu. We added it, and it became the most visited page on the site.
So we polled the people on that page, and almost 3,000 answered. Most of them didn’t own a pass yet. They wanted to know if it was worth it, or they were planning a trip.
That changed what the page had to do. We rebuilt it so every park has photos, popular activities, trip planning details and the entrance fee, along with bundles and gear for that visit.
Giving people that help brought customer acquisition cost down, and the page now works as a big acquisition channel.
The same research showed us how people plan their trips, what matters to them and what they want to avoid. That gave us the idea for digital guides that help them get the most out of the pass.
A digital guide costs nothing to deliver and arrives right away, and people could use it on their phone while they were in the park. On a store that started with an 8% margin, that mattered.
We bundled the guides with the pass on the park pages, and later used them in the bounce back flow to add more profit.
The guides helped with another problem too. The sign-up form was converting at only 3.45%, and the offer on it was mediocre. We replaced it with a free digital guide with the pass.
Then we rebuilt the welcome flow around it. The first email delivered the offer right away. The second made the pass feel worth more, the third built trust with testimonials and the brand story, and the fourth reminded people of the offer with some urgency.
The sign-up rate went from 3.45% to 11.6%, and revenue went from $62K to $147K.
More sign-ups only help if the emails are good. They weren’t sending enough campaigns, and the ones they sent were hard to read.
We moved to three to four campaigns a week, mixing promotions with content emails that just give value, so we could send more without hurting deliverability. Every email got one idea, with a clear headline, emotional images, short copy and a big button.
Behind the scenes, we stopped sending to the whole list and used segments like Engaged 90 and VIPs. We added flows for browse abandonment, cross-sells and yearly pass renewal, and a separate Microsoft segment to fix deliverability on Outlook and Hotmail.
Sale events brought in a huge influx of cash, so they got the same care. Apart from Black Friday, we built sales around moments that matter to this audience, like National Park Month in April.
Every sale followed the same plan. Before it, we planned the offers and sent one or two teaser emails. During it, we sent an email every day, put sale bundles on the homepage and sped up the abandonment flows. Afterwards, we reviewed the results and sent a thank you email.
We also took the discounts out of the abandonment flows during a sale and used urgency instead, because the site already had a good discount.
All of this added up to +$1.5M in new revenue and +20% gross margin. In James’s words: “We’ve seen $3M in sales, 20% growth in gross margin, and 69% more revenue from Klaviyo.”
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