Optimising the Tate Gallery e-commerce experience through experimentation
In the lead up to Tate’s busiest sales season we helped them react to the closure of their gallery shops and optimise their online store.
The challenge
In a challenging year for the arts and culture industry, Tate galleries saw a radical drop in visitors. To maintain relationships with their audience and protect their revenue streams, they focused on digital channels and their online environment.
Tate wanted to make rapid, incremental changes to the online Tate Shop to meet the business’s objectives for Christmas 2020 and support the 2021 January sales.
Why Cohaesus?
Tate engaged us to run a ‘quick-wins’ experimentation workstream, following our proven experience in running Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) programmes for other clients and our ability to get the programme up and running in a short amount of time.
Our agile CRO processes enabled us to run a programme of A/B experiments that gave us insight into user behaviour before implementing any permanent solutions. CRO is a powerful technique to validate hypotheses and directly map website changes to outcomes.
Our approach
Our CRO approach is a rapid and rigourous 6 -step process from hypothesis right through to post-experiment report. We worked with Tate’s ecommerce team to prioritise the experiments we believed would have the biggest impact on the organisation’s objectives.
Not all experiments will return positive results, however the insights we gather, whether positive or negative, provide valuable insight into how best to optimise the purchase journey, improve user experience and increase sales.
It is incredibly rewarding to help Tate improve their online experience and increase their revenue.
We feel privileged to play a part in Tate’s mission to ensure the right of everybody to access art
Alex Lee, Head of Experience and Design at Cohaesus
The outcome
We ran three phases of experiments focused on Tate’s key business objectives: increasing sales revenue and promoting Tate membership. We also trained the Tate team in how to run a CRO programme.
Experiments that created a sense of urgency in the lead up to Christmas and winter sales, and highlighted Tate’s unique selling points, led to an increase in order completions of over 10%.
Experiments within the check-out process also nudged customers to add more to their basket, lifting the average order value by more than 5%.
With the insight gathered from the experiments, Tate is able to implement optimisations to the purchase journey and conduct more and bolder experiments to their e-commerce site in 2021.
