Rebuilding the Funnel: A Systematic CRO Program at MedCline
Over 22 months as Senior Ecommerce Manager, we ran a structured test-and-ship program across the home page, landing pages, product pages, and checkout — while rebuilding site speed, reviews, and compliance infrastructure underneath it. Here’s what shipped, what won, and what it taught us about how MedCline’s buyers actually decide.
Owning growth end-to-end, not just testing
MedCline sells a patented medical-device sleep system — a considered, higher-ticket purchase for people managing chronic reflux or shoulder pain. Conversion work here wasn’t a single team’s job.
As Senior Ecommerce Manager, I led growth strategy across SEO, CRO, analytics, lifecycle marketing, referral marketing, and customer reviews, partnering directly with executive leadership on acquisition, conversion, and retention across every owned digital channel. That also meant managing the agency and technology vendor relationships underneath the program — including standing up OneTrust privacy and cookie-consent management to support CCPA-aligned data governance. The rest of this page walks through the 2021 test-and-ship program in detail: the five highest-signal experiments, what we learned from the ones that didn’t go as hypothesized, the site rebuild that came out of it, and the infrastructure — speed, reviews, compliance — that made the whole thing durable.
Five tests, one funnel
Running continuous VWO experiments across the buying funnel, these five produced the clearest signal in the 2021 review.
New home page hero
New landing page narrative
Home page product cards
Body pillow PDP UGC
Free shipping to returning users
“Why MedCline” brand story
The wins that changed how we wrote copy
MC48’s new landing page structure didn’t just lift conversion — it changed where people clicked. On the original pages, the hero’s primary CTA captured 20–25% of all link clicks. On the new structure, the hero CTA earns 7–10%, the first post-hero UGC block earns another 9–10%, and — most tellingly — 61–69% of all link clicks now happen on the last three CTAs on the page. The new structure didn’t ask for an early decision; it walked people down the page and let them decide at the end.
The checkout UGC series (MC45/50/52/53/60/65) ran six iterations testing which testimonial, for which audience, drove returning users to convert. It’s the clearest map we have of what persuades this buyer at the point of payment:
Removing one emoji outperformed the original by double digits — our buyers didn’t relate to emojis when they were about to pay. Pairing two testimonials beat one, and pairing an emotional, “life-changing” quote with a concrete, relatable one outperformed either alone. Urgency messaging underperformed both variants: “buy now, while supplies last” lost −25.58% against the two-UGC version, and “buy now, ships tomorrow” lost −9.18%. For a considered medical-device purchase, manufactured urgency read as a warning sign, not a nudge.
The PDP description tests (MC41, MC34, MC43) told a consistent story underneath: UGC beat a plain-text description by 17.55% and beat icon-plus-text by 9.29%. Third-party proof consistently outperformed MedCline describing its own product.
New front end, shipped from what won
2021’s biggest site changes were downstream of the test program above, not separate from it.
The new home page hero, landing pages, and collections page all shipped this way — each carrying forward the narrative structure and CTA placement the tests had already validated, rather than a redesign done on instinct.
The PDP buy box was redesigned to (1) make choosing a size and unit count clearer, (2) accommodate the bundle upsell, and (3) remove the redundant quick-pay button so there was exactly one primary CTA instead of several competing for attention.
The infrastructure underneath the tests
A test-and-ship program this fast needs a foundation that doesn’t break under it — reviews people trust, support that’s actually responsive, a site that’s usable for everyone, and data governance that holds up.
Okendo added May 2021 for review generation and management, integrated with Klaviyo (email) and Postscript (SMS), Gorgias, and Google Shopping.
Full-site accessibility delivered through our partner accessiBe.
CCPA-aligned privacy program with user-controlled consent settings through OneTrust.
Leaned into MedCline’s customer-service reputation as a live-chat-driven reason to buy.
Third-party scripts were the tax on every page
Tracking pixels, live chat, the accessibility widget, and cookie management all depend on calls to third-party servers to load. Since November 2020, average load speed had been climbing as we added scripts for each new marketing initiative — the CRO wins above were happening on an increasingly heavy page. We partnered with Yottaa starting April 24, 2021 to cut third-party script load time.
- Program
- VWO-run A/B and multivariate tests; confidence levels shown are as reported at each test’s read during the 2021 program.
- Period
- November 2020 – September 2022, as Senior Ecommerce Manager at MedCline. Itemized test results are drawn from the internal “CRO & Site 2021” year-end review deck; the stat strip at the top reflects results across the full tenure.
- Screenshots
- Shown from MedCline’s live site for illustrative, factual reporting purposes.
- Attribution
- Jonathan Catalan (Finegold) led this program as Senior Ecommerce Manager, MedCline, reporting to executive leadership.