Incremental Gains - Pet Drugs Online

If the Pet Drugs Online website was a cyclist it would be wearing the yellow jersey of the race leader.

It continually outperforms industry growth, has seen a 32% year-on-year increase in visitors and has 99% positive customer feedback.

So how could we improve the customer experience and increase conversion rate?
 
The project we undertook could be considered the equivalent to the shaving of one’s legs for greater aerodynamics and reducing the weight of the bike by a few grams: small-scale changes contributing to award-winning results.
 
But enough of the cycling metaphor for now.
 
Having decided to focus on making improvements to the customer experience specifically on smart phones (due to it seeing the largest growth of all devices at 180% year-on-year revenue growth), we picked out the five templates that form the crux of any transactional journey. We combined efforts from strategists and designers to create test variants, the purpose of which were to test the likelihood of users completing a transaction if we made a change to: the homepage, search results, category, sub-category and product templates.
 
These were built in Kentico and set to display at an even 50/50 split. The tests ran concurrently over 30 day periods and were exhaustively tracked in Google Analytics. After that period we had conclusive results (to at least a 92% confidence level) for four of the five tests.
 
The variant view model means we can easily make a test permanent, or make a change to a test. So we have a truly agile solution and enormous capacity to learn as we go, and importantly to learn purely from user behaviour.
 
The five tests each contributed to an increase in conversion rate on mobile. By extrapolating what this would mean for increased number of purchases, multiplied by average order value on mobile, we can see that in the course of a year, the project benefit if all tests variants are made defaults mean a return on investment of 1150%. Naturally, our client at Pet Drugs Online is delighted, and keen to roll out a continuous test programme with a broader remit than just smart phone use.
 
Just the kind of brief we thrive on here at true.
 
So how do you stay ahead of the chasing pack? Continuous improvement and incremental gains. And possibly shaving your legs.