This case study looks at Ashridge Nurseries (which ships plants and garden supplies to customers in the UK) and how the business boosted its conversion rate (CR) by 25 percent in a period of just a few months. We examine the tests we ran, how these impacted CR, and what impact this had on the business in the long run.
The lessons we learned from this project can be applied to many other types of businesses in similar situations.
Customer profile
Ashridge Nurseries (www.ashridgetrees.co.uk) is a mail-order plant nursery and gardening shop that specializes in trees, hedging and flowers. Ashridge delivers a wide range of planting products across mainland UK.
The challenge
The client was willing to experiment and improve its website’s conversion rate leveraging the upcoming high-season traffic increase.
Why did they pick InsightWhale?
To conduct the experiments and perform a CRO campaign, the customer selected InsightWhale due to our proven track record of e-commerce optimization projects, swift improvements and granular reporting from day one.
Timeline
During the period from October 2017 to April 2018, InsightWhale conducted 10 tests out of 23 initially proposed in the CRO audit. Given the strict time frame, we handpicked the ten tests that would make the most impact on the specific customer environment.
Tests and outcomes
The InsightWhale team conducted tests on most areas of the sales funnel – from the homepage to the checkout process. The tests covered:
Homepage CTA
Cart page layout
Product listing layout
Size selection block
Checkout process
The layout of the home page category section
New product page layout
Cart page layout
Mobile layout for the homepage and menu
New headers with improved structure
Nine tests out of ten revealed increased conversion rates ranging from +5 to +25 percent! The last one’s improvement showed mixed results on tablets and desktops. The campaign thus yielded a 90 percent overall test success rate.
Business impact
The website has been improved with better layouts and more logical content structures, leading to up to 25% CR improvements per test over the course of 8 months. Employed in the peak season, these tweaks resulted in solid monetary gains and laid the groundwork for further improvements (in overall content, message, and product descriptions).
Lessons learned
- E-commerce websites are very responsive to change and can greatly benefit from a simple facelift, as well as well-weighted enhancements in usability and value proposition.
- Ignoring mobile platforms is not a good idea, even with a senior audience – addressing mobile usability issues yielded one of the higher CR improvements.
- Planning the test schedule in advance is key with seasonal businesses.
- Having the existing product page information re-arranged in a streamlined manner pays off with consistently higher CRs.
Next steps
Performing further Conversion Rate Optimization processes, including tweaks in the landing page content, tests on the checkout experience, and upsell experiments will increase the retention rates and sale targets even greater.
A next step in the enhancement of a website’s performance would be to allocate more time prior to the high season and maximize the number of tests for achieving greater results.
