How Cotopaxi Builds Their Website Roadmap Based on Mouseflow Data

Cotopaxi is inspired by adventures. Founded in 2014, this travel gear and apparel brand champions exploration and sustainability. More adventures, more time outdoors, and supporting communities – that’s what Cotopaxi and their Gear for Good idea are about. Cotopaxi even donates 1% of their revenue to a nonprofit organization that helps communities experiencing poverty.

Cotopaxi travel gear can be found in apparel stores all around the world, but Cotopaxi also has their online brand stores in Australia, EU, Great Britain, Japan, and New Zealand. Cotopaxi’s websites are constantly evolving to provide users with the best possible experience. Kirby Crook, Conversion Rate Optimization Associate Director at Cotopaxi, together with the eCommerce team has been in charge of this process, striving to delight the website visitors.

The Challenge: What Do Users Want and Need?

One of Kirby’s tasks is to build a website roadmap and prioritize new features. And one of the problems that he faces is the same for all eCommerce managers, marketers, conversion rate optimization specialists, and others. It’s finding out what do the users actually want?

Playing the guessing game and blindly following the best practices doesn’t get you very far. To make meaningful improvements on the website, and to know which features to build next, you need to know your user, and know them well. Who are they? What are they looking for? What do they like? Where do they struggle? What do they expect?

Having answers to these questions can give you ideas on experiments to run on the website to improve the users’ experience, increasing brand loyalty and conversions.

The Solution: Let The Users Tell and Show You

To overcome this problem, Cotopaxi needed data on their users: how they behave on the website, and what they think or want in certain situations. So, Kirby and the team set out on a quest to collect this data, using a behavior analytics platform for that.

Cotopaxi has been relying on Mouseflow since 2021, and about four people on Kirby’s team are regularly engaging with the tool. So, it was only natural that they worked with Mouseflow to solve this challenge.

Using Mouseflow’s user feedback tool, Kirby’s team set up mini-surveys that appeared when users performed certain actions on the website or visited certain pages. This “active feedback”, as Kirby calls it, allowed the team to get real answers from real users regarding what they wanted and how satisfied they were with the website experience. And that, in turn, helped inform Cotopaxi’s A/B testing roadmap and feature enhancements on the website.

However, sometimes users don’t realize what they need or don’t communicate it clearly. So, in their decision-making, Cotopaxi’s team relies on “passive feedback” as well – they monitored click and scroll heatmaps, as well as watched website session recordings. This allowed them to get a broader perspective of how the users behave on the website, where they want to get to, and what is their journey towards this point.

Of course, the team at Cotopaxi also kept an eye on website friction score, and made sure to improve areas where users experienced click-errors or click-rages.

The Result: Building The Customer-Driven Website Roadmap

Using “active” and “passive” feedback, Kirby and the team built a customer-driven website roadmap with experiment ideas based on real user requests and feedback, as well as their behavior patterns.

One of the main goals for CRO teams is to run experiments as often as possible and on a stable schedule. With data from Mouseflow to inform their experiments, the team at Cotopaxi built and executed an experimentation plan with 5 tests per month over a year.

These experiments are not based only on assumptions, as it often happens, but rather on actual feedback from customers and their behavior insights. So, they have a much higher chance of having a positive impact on the user experience.

This is an ongoing process that the team at Cotopaxi continues to employ to get ideas for further experiments, as well as to quickly discover and fix friction points on their website.

Company: Cotopaxi
Tools used: Mouseflow, Klaviyo, Dynamic Yield
CMS: Shopify
Features used in Mouseflow: Feedback Surveys, Heatmaps, Friction Score, Session Replays