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Conversion has used the following skills/services in the project.
Gousto had an unusual problem:
As the UK leader in food recipe subscription services, they were hugely popular. In fact, they were so popular that they were operating at capacity and were therefore unable to increase their customer base significantly.
But as a Venture Capital backed business, they still had growth targets to hit. So instead of growing their customer base, their short-term targets were instead focused on increasing average order value.
Gousto had tried experimentation in the past, but after a number of unsuccessful attempts, they'd ultimately decided it wasn’t for them.
That’s where Conversion came in.
Their VP of Digital Product had worked with us in the past and had seen how we were able to transform customer insights into bottom-line results.
We were therefore hired to work with the Gousto team to optimize their customer experience and increase their AOV.
After contributing some incredibly positive results, we believed we could extend this advantage by focusing on Gousto’s marketplace – where they sell third-party products like wine, beer and desserts.
We knew that customers weren’t actively engaging with marketplace products. Our priority was to understand ‘why’.
Our extensive customer research showed that a large proportion of users didn’t even know the marketplace existed. Our scroll reach analysis supported this, suggesting that only a fraction of customers were reaching the market products on the page.
With one experiment, we re-positioned the marketplace as a step in the order process, rather than an optional extra.
On the order confirmation page, ‘The Gousto Market’ just about appeared above the fold, but with no real messaging or clear imagery to further entice the customer who had just placed their order.
We reduced the size of the confirmation messaging, and positioned it as a ‘completed step’ in the order process. This made it more compact, and provided more room above the fold to increase visibility of the Gousto Market.
We then added a second step that prompted the customer to ‘Add desserts, drinks, snacks & more from the Gousto Market’. These were the most popular categories in the marketplace, and highlighted the variety of optional extras on offer (to see screenshots for this experiment, click on the image directly above the 'Opportunity' section of this case study).
By re-positioning the Gousto Market as a step in the order process and optimizing the messaging and page layout to increase its prominence, we believed it would increase exposure and therefore purchases of ancillary products.
The results were clear – with this one experiment, we'd been able to increase highly-profitable ancillary sales by a massive 20%.
Moreover, by positively iterating on this result, we'd been able to go on a run of winning experiments across the site and increase AOV significantly.
In fact, Gousto were so impressed with the work being delivered that after just five months of working together, they asked us to expand our remit to focus on both acquisition in the subscription funnel as well as customer retention.
All in all, the project was a huge success, and we were able to achieve an 18x return on investment for Gousto in just 18 months.
