With a range of USPs, from no booking fees and paperless tickets to allowing users to book tickets for all UK trains, Northern has built a vast customer base and a solid platform for future growth.
"It’s been a pleasure working with Enjoy on our CRO journey. They’ve spent time getting to know our market and customers and created tests that have helped increase our conversions and improve our customers’ journeys. They build their tests based on data and user-tested evidence, which have given fruitful results for the Northern website. We're really enjoying the partnership and looking forward to where the journey will take us."
Sam I’Anson, Senior Digital Marketing Manager
The rail industry has faced a series of challenges in recent times - from the global pandemic to the cost of living crisis and train strikes - all of which have impacted opportunities and demand for rail travel.
As a result, Northern experienced a decline in its online conversion rates, with consumer behaviour and habits changing around travel.
So, they appointed Enjoy to help optimise conversion rates across their website, making their users’ digital journeys as quick and as convenient as possible.
We have a saying at Enjoy: “We don’t assume, we seek to know”, so we put data-driven insight at the start and heart of everything. And this project was no exception.
As with all new clients, we kicked off this project with an immersion workshop. With caffeine and good vibes in full flow, this was our opportunity to learn, listen, digest, probe, and understand their business through the lens of multiple stakeholders. Their ambitions, challenges, priorities, objectives, past wins, learnings, and marketplace.
Following the immersion phase, we then moved into our discovery phase. This is where we ‘look under the bonnet’ of a business, to observe and identify key insights, trends, and areas of potential focus. This process helps us join the dots between the outputs of the immersion session and the reality of what the data tells us.
Then, we conducted a data deep dive, exploring user journeys, behaviour, and engagement to understand what’s working, what’s not, and quantify opportunities.
To gather further insight, we conducted user testing, arranging interviews with a number of participants, reflective of Northern’s key audience personas within the Northern catchment area. The purpose was to get a clearer and more accurate understanding of:
Backed by this insight, we hosted an internal UX review, bringing our experts together to produce a list of hypotheses we could feed into our experimentation plan.
With our experimentation plan mapped out, it was time for our creative team to get to work. They brought our ideas to life, visualising new on-page components for Northern’s digital experience based on insights.
With fresh designs in hand, we coupled these with the existing visuals and fed them into our user-testing hub. Here, we presented both the control and test variants to an online panel and asked them to pick their design preferences, providing feedback. This process allowed us to validate our designs swiftly and at scale, ensuring that we were firmly on the right track.
When the preference testing was done and dusted, it was now a case of prioritising which tests we should run first.
The ICE methodology is a crucial element of our tried and tested CRO process at Enjoy. We use it to prioritise our efforts, ranking each hypothesis we want to test based on impact, confidence, and ease. Before each potential experiment, we use this methodology to answer the following questions:
We then assign a score between one and ten for each of these questions. For each test, we calculate the maths and run experiments for those with the highest scores first, to maximise our efforts.
With our designs at the ready and our priority plan in place, our development team began building the on-page components.
Confident of the success of our experiments, backed by insight and validated by users, A/B testing allowed us to observe how variants perform in a real-world environment and provide statistically reliable results. At Enjoy, we treat A/B testing as an ongoing process as it allows us to refine, monitor, and learn from everything we do, while continually maximising performance.
And that’s exactly what we do for Northern. Here’s just a handful of the tests we’ve run across their website:
We knew Northern’s booking form was the key conversion point across its website, and we had a number of ideas to optimise it, honing in on the structure, styling, positioning, and usability. Tweaks to the form positioning generated particularly impressive results, especially across mobile devices, driving a 50% increase in form starts and a 45% increase in completions.
As we’ve mentioned, Northern Trains have a long list of USP’s, but we knew they could do more to promote these and in turn, positively influence the user purchase path. Our hypothesis was supported by user-testing, with many participants remaining unaware of Northern’s key USPs, such as no booking fees, even after visiting the site. Our test page incorporated a USP panel, placed prominently on the homepage. This experiment led to a 10.4% increase in booking form completions
During our digital analysis, we noted that the scroll depth across key pages was high, but there was no persistent CTA in place to capture demand. Our test design incorporated one, and the experiment showed that users were more likely to convert as a result.
Over the last two years of working with Northern we have conducted a number of planning phases of activity, with research methods including tracking enhancements, journey analysis, engagement analysis, form analysis, heatmaps, session recordings, user testing (moderated and unmoderated), competitor audits, design feedback, first click test, preference testing and eye tracking.
All of this insight allows us to continually develop and reprioritise the experimentation plan, powering our continual testing sprints and driving results.
We’ve achieved some incredible results with Northern and show no signs of slowing down:
Enjoy is an award-winning digital experience and performance agency. And it’s our mission to transform and grow brands digitally, ethically, and sustainably, and to forever challenge expectations about what digital can deliver.
At Enjoy, we understand that optimisation is key to getting the best from your marketing. That’s why we crunch the data on every channel, platform, and initiative to help you deliver transformational results.
Find out more about our conversion rate optimisation services and get in touch today!
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