The company
New Look is a British global fashion retailer with a chain of shops offering clothing, footwear, and accessories for women, men, and teens. With customers flocking to product detail pages (PDPs) on New Look's website, optimization and testing has never been more important.
The digital team at New Look share 3 experiments that have completely transformed New Look’s PDP performance, helping to drive additional revenue for the brand.
Key metrics
+3.7% increase to desktop add-to-bag rate in inline imagery test
+2.7% increase to desktop add-to-bag rate in color swatch preview test
+3.9% increase in add to bag rate size selector test
The challenge
As high streets reopened post-pandemic, New Look saw a general decline in movement through the funnel from their PDPs, with a -34% drop off rate between product view and add to bag.
The challenge for Mike Hatch, former Experimentation Manager and his colleague, Elinor Pierce, Ecommerce Manager at New Look, was to understand and counter this downward trend.
As a long-standing Contentsquare partner, New Look was used to using data-driven insights to analyze tests and optimize its digital experience, but the question was where to focus its efforts.
At New Look, we were always testing and aiming to improve our website, and Contentsquare had been helping us to do that since 2019. Naturally, we leveraged the insights that Contentsquare could give us as part of this project, and that really helped us to focus our efforts and work out what to test.
The solution
Mike and Elinor leveraged Contentsquare's Experience Analytics product to diagnose where their site was losing potential customers.
“Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis capability showed us that we had a high average exit rate of 21.5% on our PDPs. This, and other behavioural insights led us to make a series of small, incremental tests on our PDPs,” Mike says.
In all, they carried out a total of 16 tests on their PDPs, of which 3 in particular had the greatest impact:
Journey Analysis of New Look's PDP
1. Testing inline imagery
Mike and Elinor hypothesized that testing inline imagery across all devices could improve their add-to-bag rate by 5%. They tested new images that allowed customers to see clothing items from every angle more easily and intuitively.
Analysis of the test results in Contentsquare showed their hypothesis was right—inline imagery increased the add-to-bag rate by +3.7% on desktop.
New Look's PDP before (left) and after (right) optimization with inline imagery
2. Optimizing color swatch preview
Analysis using Contentsquare's Heatmaps capability showed only 15% of customers engaged with color swatches on PDPs. The team saw an opportunity to optimize these swatches and increase click-through and add-to-bag rates. They hypothesized that by replacing the existing simple colored squares with a colour preview of the clothing item would increase add-to-bag rate by 1%.
Interestingly, Heatmap analysis showed click-through rates decreased, indicating customers were able to get a preview within in the same view and did not need to click on images. The new imagery also had a positive increase of +2.7% on add-to-bag rate for desktop.
3. Size selector optimization
Today, online customers expect to see which sizes of a garment are available at a glance, without having to search. Mike and Elinor believed that testing size tiles was an obvious step.
Sure enough, the testing resulted in a +3.9% increase in the add-to-bag rate.
New Look's PDP size selector feature before (left) and after (right) optimization
The results
All these small incremental changes have completely transformed New Look’s PDP format. Not only has this improved New Look's online shopping experience overall, but it has helped drive additional revenue for the brand.
“Multiple small increases in add-to-bag rates made a significant impact on our results,” says Mike.
New look's PDP before (left) and after (right) optimization
What's next
Elinor is keen to carry on building on the transformative changes made as a result of the PDP experimentation.
In particular, the results have inspired a host of new optimizations within New Look’s digital app, and has been used as the basis for a website redesign and re-platforming.
New Look’s digital team has developed a full test roadmap based on key questions, such as how PDPs can incorporate sustainability, user-generated content (UGC), and personalization.
Our PDP tests were developed from Contentsquare’s unrivalled customer insight, driving significant, incremental revenue, and have paved the way for our upcoming site redesign. The results have since inspired and enabled app optimizations, and more importantly, this is just the start. We’ll continue to iterate, helping customers in their mission to find their new look.
