Marshalls grows revenue 32% with CRO

Marshalls is an e-commerce gardening website that sells seeds, plants and gardening accessories. While in the process of migrating to a brand new website, they needed to ensure their existing website was still working hard in the short-to medium-term to drive sales and hit business objectives.

They wanted to make improvements to their website and checkout process to convert more visitors and give customers a smoother user experience.

We have been working with Marshalls across a number of disciplines, including CX, SEO, CRO, analytics, and web development, to help them achieve digital success.

Our CRO objectives have been to:

• Boost revenue generated by the site by improving conversion rates and average order values

• Achieve optimal return on CRO investment

• Understand more about what website features work for their users

We worked closely with Marshalls to build a deep understanding of their business, users and customer journeys.

The programme started with a CRO discovery phase, including stakeholder workshops, UX review and quantitative analysis of web analytics to identify key issues and opportunities. These insights were combined with user research, including remote user testing, to understand both what users were doing and why.

From this, we developed and prioritised a roadmap of test hypotheses, delivered through an iterative “test and learn” approach. We managed the full testing process, from ideation and design through to build and deployment, running experiments across key areas of the purchase journey.

The first test we ran on the site focused on category and results pages and resulted in +9.8% higher conversion rate, an increased average order value of +7.8%, and an increase of 16.7% in revenue per visitor. The first test alone covered the budget for a year’s worth of CRO tooling and services.

Another seven tests covered key stages of the journey identified as opportunities in discovery and delivered uplift in progression rates from site search, category pages, basket, and checkout.

Cumulatively, by the end of the financial year (August ‘19), the CRO program had achieved +216% ROI and a 32% uplift to revenue. Testing continued up until a site migration cut off point. A number of refinements and a large product page test continued to generate an uplift in performance for Marshalls.

By testing and making changes to the website based on fact rather than assumption, we succeeded in helping Marshalls achieve uplift to website performance within their financial year and continued to grow conversion rate and increase average order values.