Putting Polar.com through its paces

Polar heart rate monitors, fitness trackers, and GPS sport watches get under the skin of your training—from improving an athlete’s sports performance to helping people enjoy a healthier lifestyle, and aiding rehabilitation and weight management. They’ve been leading the way in fitness technology since 1977, and have grown into an international powerhouse supplying over 35,000 retail outlets in more than 80 countries.

Polar wearables are known for extreme durability and accuracy, and can track steps, calories, heart rate, sleep and use GPS to map speed, distance, and route. However, while the brand excels at fitness and training innovation, Polar was facing increasingly fierce competition as fitness trackers saw exponential adoption rates, large tech brands began to take on the fitness space, and resellers drove bottom-of-the-barrel pricing.

How could Polar drive more sales on polar.com while competing against resellers and the likes of Fitbit, Nike, Garmin, and Apple?

Digitally tracking ourselves has become a major fixture of modern, connected life and spans an impressively wide breadth of demographics and uses: from data junkies and elite athletes to yoga classes, CrossFitters, kiddos, workplace wellness programs, and even rehabilitation. A staggering one-in-five US adults (21%) say they regularly wear a smartwatch or wearable fitness tracker (Pew Research Center).

So, we knew that interest was ready to be tapped into. However, when 80% of consumers say they look around to pricecheck when shopping online, we needed a truly creative media strategy to encourage sales on Polar.com (that didn’t resort to race-to-the-bottom price wars) to take on price-point-driven resellers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart.

Dragon360 crafted a robust advertising and conversion rate optimization strategy for Polar.

conversion rate optimization

We began by identifying key technical opportunities, performance issues, and potential drop-off points in the shopping flow and user experience. After all, in the e-commerce space, every second of additional page load or other delay causes a 7% drop in conversion.

We were able to significantly improve conversion rates on polar.com by using heat maps, site visitor recordings, and iterative A/B testing to optimize the shopping and cart experience, product landing pages, and dynamic display of customer reviews.

product launch retargeting campaigns

In the weeks before and just after a product launch, when polar.com would have a product exclusive to the resellers, we ran personalized retargeting campaigns to celebrate and showcase the new product to loyal brand enthusiasts and existing Polar customers before everyone else. YouTube campaigns also helped build launch anticipation, and helped tell seamless brand stories across their social channels. Viewers could also engage with the product and purchase via shoppable TrueView ads post-launch.

Google shopping

To make Polar as competitive as possible, our Shopping strategy was focused on real-time adjustments and proactively monitoring and tracking price fluctuations across 20+ reseller and competitor sites. By quickly and aggressively taking advantage of identified opportunities and then and pulling back incrementally as the window passed, we gained more ground more often.

search

Search campaigns across Google and Bing were set up to better include longtail product and branded searches as well as broader phrases around fitness and Polar, driving stronger returns and heightened visibility.

Dragon360 ran comprehensive digital advertising campaigns that drove e-commerce revenue, brand awareness, and brand preference, while substantially improving e-commerce conversion rates through testing and implementing best practices and findings. Our campaigns accounted for 21% of overall shop revenue, and saw an average order value 15% higher than previous benchmarks