How experimentation helped Liberty grow eCommerce revenue by £4m in one year

Client Challenge

Liberty London was struggling to drive significant change in ecommerce performance as a result of slow internal processes + website design by committee + a disconnect between strategy and website development

Solution

In partnership with Optimizely we put experimentation at the heart of ecommerce development operations.

Our approach included implementation of…

• Efficient front end design and experimentation

• Advanced statistical measurement

• Experimentation operating system

• Consultancy services

Campaign optimisations

The Liberty London website had a non-conventional, vertical desktop navigation. Journey Further quickly learned through user research that this was causing confusion for users. We used EyeQuant in order to help make our case.

Our UX and creative team mocked up a rough version of what a horizontal navigation would look like, and we were then able to compare both to assess the viewability and engagement of the search function. We were able to demonstrate that users could be up to 3 times more likely to notice the search function in a more conventional location.

Changing the layout and user-interface of the navigation has implications for the taxonomy and information architecture, so the test was run in two phases.

In the first phase we wanted to test the hypothesis as efficiently as possible, so we simply changed the UI and managed to work the existing taxonomy into the new structure in a satisfactory way. This was tested in a relatively short time frame but established positive and significant results quickly.

Once we had established the concept was viable we were then able to invest more time into a more robust design.

The test ran for just over 3 weeks and resulted in a significant, observed uplift in conversion of over 7% and average revenue per user of 15%. The new navigation also increased usage of the search function by 26% and the account icon by 20%.

The annualised estimated revenue for making this change is £3.7m.

The team at Journey Further go way beyond what most consider to be CRO. They’re getting under the skin of our business strategy and building and testing some really complex site changes to help us innovate eCommerce rather than just tweak. This is enormously valuable to us because it helps us move far quicker and keep demand on internal IT down whilst streamlining decisions

James Moore, Head of Digital Experience (Liberty London)

Results

In 9 months we demonstrated potential annualised incremental revenue of £5.6m (the benefit of positive changes + the risk avoidance of negative changes + dev cost savings)

We have created R&D benefits in broader areas of the business – for example by testing clothing photography we have been able to influence investment in asset creation