RangeMe Deal Days
Project
RangeMe Deal Days
Client
RangeMe
sector
E-Commerce
project date
August 2022
Overview
RangeMe is not known as an e-commerce platform, but it wants to be.
To help promote ordering on RangeMe, the leadership team tasked us with planning a seasonal sale dubbed "Deal Days". My goal was two-fold: enable suppliers to set product discounts before the event, and create reusable marketing components to target buyers in-platform during the sale.
Context
RangeMe is a discovery platform that connects suppliers and retailers across the globe. I joined RangeMe near the beginning of a strategic initiative to enable ordering directly on the platform, allowing buyers to not only discover products but also close the loop by placing a purchase order. In order to market RangeMe as a transaction marketplace, stakeholders wanted to host a seasonal discount event similar to Prime Day on Amazon where suppliers temporarily discount their products to increase the use of ordering.
Enabling Supplier Discounts
Before we could begin planning Deal Days, we first had to build the infrastructure to allow the event to happen. We had already done discovery on volume-based pricing, so I repurposed my research and initial concepts from that project to begin wireframing the Special Event Discount flow. My designs were made with speed of implementation in mind—being reusable for both future special events and for ongoing discounts such as negotiated pricing.
Buyer Discovery
On the buyer side, we had to figure out how to make it easy for buyers to discover which products and brands have active discounts. I conducted competitive research on filtering, in-product marketing, and visually highlighting discounts within the main browse experience.
Building the Back-End
As the development team was building out the discount infrastructure, I was refining the UI of the main discount customer journey. For suppliers, I ran a pilot test of the new "Custom price list" flow with some of our most vocal users to validate that the process is clear and the level of control over their pricing is appropriate. For buyers, I added visual discount indicators to the browse experience, the checkout, and on invoices. Having these designs finalized early in the development process allowed me to focus my attention on planning Deal Days itself.
Branding & Marketing
To begin preparing for Deal Days, I looped the marketing team into the project to flesh out the branding, visuals, and copy for our first event. I provided our in-house graphic designer with specs for the various banners and advertisements that were needed. We worked together to create a seasonal name for the event, ultimately landing on RangeMe Deal Days: Summer Savings. I assisted the head of marketing in writing variant copy for every permutation of a supplier account (free user with no products uploaded, premium user with no discounts set, etc). With the core branding and copy in place, we announced the event publicly and suppliers were able to start setting their discounts.
Rapid Iteration
Marketing, emails, and press releases started going out daily after Deal Days was announced. Internally, the dev team was still finalizing the front-end of all the new design components that would appear once the sale began. They only had around two weeks to ensure that everything is functional and fully responsive, so in a last-minute QA meeting we agreed to remove some of the background visuals to ensure that we delivered on schedule.
Deal Days Goes Live
When Deal Days began, it took over the site. It was advertised on the log in screen, in a pop-up window when you first sign in, a card on the home page, a banner on the browse page, a notification in your inbox, an email campaign, and even direct calls from customer success managers to our most loyal buyers. We took precaution to spread out this messaging over the course of two weeks, trying to avoid overwhelming our suppliers or annoying our buyers. Here is a sample of that marketing:
A Great Success!
Deal Days launched in August 2022, and the number of orders skyrocketed from a weekly average of 10 to nearly 90. The number of buyers looking at products also grew more than 400%, with 200+ buyers viewing discounted products during the sale. While those numbers appear small at first glance, this means that nearly half of the buyers who viewed Deal Days made a purchase, massively exceeding the average e-commerce conversion funnel of 3%. Deal Days accomplished everything it set out to do in its first run, and leadership saw great potential in scaling it into a recurring event.
Deal Days Templatization
Discussions of the next Deal Days sale happened almost immediately, with executives suggesting it should occur as often as every two weeks. To speed up the planning of future events, I designed a reusable template in Figma that could be edited by anyone, even without design experience, to automate as much of the design and marketing process as possible. First, I translated the existing designs into responsive Figma components that match what is in production one-to-one. I added a background image toggle that didn't make it into the first Deal Days, so future events could incorporate graphics into the banners instead of being restricted to a solid color.
Simplified Marketing
After finalizing the Figma components, I created a Design Key that can be edited to update the logo, background image, background colors, and text color on every instance of every component for an event. In addition, I created a Marketing Key that lists out every piece of copy that was written for the event, where and when that copy appears, and I reference the Figma frame that has the corresponding copy inside it. This enables marketing to edit event copy in one place instead of commenting on hundreds of mockups with suggested edits, simplifying the process for engineering to update the copy on the live site.
Follow-up & Impact
After Deal Days had ended, my product manager and I sent out a buyer survey to gather feedback on the event. We learned that many buyers first heard about the sale through their Customer Success Manager, so marketing was very inorganic compared to the in-product marketing that led suppliers to set their discounts. This realization became a focal point in my work when I led the roadmapping and planning to increase Buyer Engagement on RangeMe.
Deal Days marked the beginning of a strategic shift for the business. Suppliers setting custom price lists for special events grew into ongoing discounts such as volume-based pricing and negotiated pricing. The Deal Days template became increasingly relevant when our parent company, ECRM, decided to start hosting trade shows on RangeMe. Best of all, Deal Days served as a proof-of-concept to show that ordering on RangeMe works, and it has the potential to transform the company into a full-fledged B2B e-commerce giant.
