Establishing, Operating, And Enabling Experimentation at ASDA George

Since its launch in 1989, ASDA George has expanded its presence to encompass more than 560 physical stores, and an online platform.

The online fashion business has swiftly become one of the fastest-growing, catering to over 800,000 customer on a weekly basis.

ASDA chose Creative CX amongst a competitive pitch, which didn’t disappoint, as we went above and beyond to prove our worth.

Over a transformative 3-year collaboration, Creative CX played a pivotal role in initiating and fostering an experimentation programme for ASDA George.

The initiative aimed at not only implementing the right tools, but also establishing a self-sufficient culture of experimentation within the organisation.

At Creative CX we pride ourselves in always planning to make ourselves redundant, and this case study proves the fact.

 

Onboarding

Creative CX was pivotal in selecting and onboarding ASDA George’s digital experimentation and personalisation capabilities through strategic and technical input.

Our collaboration focused on several key areas:

 

Vendor Selection and Experimentation Technology Integration

We assisted ASDA George in selecting the most appropriate experimentation vendor.

This decision was based on crucial platform capabilities such as overall snippet performance and critical capabilities, including targeting, metrics and reporting, personalisation, recommendations, and creating experiment templates using extensions.

Our team ensured that the technology was suited to current needs and scalable for future experimentation requirements, such as server-side experimentation.

 

Onboarding and Performance Testing on Commerce Cloud

Creative CX facilitated onboarding the chosen experimentation vendor onto ASDA George’s CMS platform, a critical step in integrating the technology into existing system.

Recognising ASDA George’s focus on performance, we embarked on a series of tests to validate the true performance impact of the snippet.

This involved deploying the snippet using server-side experimentation and alongside the evaluation of critical metrics like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), First Contentful Paint (FCP), amongst other and their effects across key business metrics such as CVR, Revenue and others.

This extended to various devices, browser types, and network speeds to understand key performance variances.

This comprehensive approach allowed us to gather critical insights in fine-tuning the deployment strategy.

Standardisation

We worked closely with ASDA George to agree on crucial implementation standards and practice overall platform governance.

This was particularly important for teams outside the core experimentation team, ensuring a unified approach across the organisation.

The experimentation platform was fully integrated with Adobe Analytics, providing additional insight for more comprehensive business reporting.

We achieved less than a 2% discrepancy in user and conversion data, establishing deep trust in the data collected through the experimentation platform and Adobe Analytics.

 

Experimentation Templates for Non-Technical Teams

Our team helped ASDA George create several experiment templates that allowed non-technical teams to deploy experimentation and personalisation campaigns at scale.

This initiative significantly democratised the use of experimentation across the organisation.

In summary, Creative CX’s comprehensive approach covered everything from vendor selection and technology integration to data integration, process standardisation, platform governance, and reporting integration.

This holistic support not only streamlined ASDA George’s experimentation processes but also ensured that these sophisticated capabilities were accessible and effective across all relevant teams.

 

Fully Managed Experimentation Service

After establishing Optimisation and experimentation processes that seamlessly integrated into the organisation’s workflow, Creative CX worked closely with business stakeholders to provide a fully managed experimentation service delivering 2-3 insight-driven A/B/n tests per month.

The activities included:

1. Uncovering user problems opportunities for innovation by carrying out Opportunity Audits (Data analysis, expert reviews and usability testing).
2. Running collaborative ideation sessions to solve the identified problems generating powerful ideas for improvements and innovation.
3. Designing the variations using an internal design system, aiming to test multiple variations where we had multiple possible solutions to the problem.
4. Development of variations to the high standards that ASDA George required.
5. QA testing on real devices.
6. Launch and monitoring.
7. Evaluation and results analysis to gain further learning which is essential to drive maximum value from the programme. The excellent results were in some way due to this iterative approach.

This phase of work was crucial to prove the value and long term potential of experimentation.

Due to the Creative CX process, the emphasis on insight-driven ideas and the adventurousness of A/B/n tests delivered, we were able to achieve a very high win rate of 39% (business metrics) and overall an exceptional ROI for the totality of our work of 6,700%.

 

Passing the torch with training

An important part of the process involved training business stakeholders to take ownership of their experiment strategy to become self-sufficient.

Through this process the Creative CX team made sure to make themselves available the entire time to provide development and analysis support.

Additional training for technical teams was imperative to enable ASDA George experimentation teams to run the full end-to-end cycle with Creative CX support and advice.

 

The Result

The collaboration between Creative CX and ASDA George proved successful, resulting in ASDA George gaining the expert knowledge to be able to establish a cultural shift towards experimentation.

This shift wasn’t just about adopting tools; it ingrained the key mindset of continuous improvement and data-driven decision-making.

However, perhaps the most significant milestone was the point when ASDA George gained the capability to innovate and optimise independently, reaching a level of maturity where Creative CX’s on going support was no longer essential.

Proving to make ourselves redundant

This case study stands as a testament to Creative CX’s principle of planning to make ourselves redundant. We fundamentally believe in building a build, operate, and transfer plan that enables any business to become completely self-sufficient in their experimentation programme.

 

Testimonial from ASDA George

“I just wanted to say a massive thank you for all you have done and educated us on. It’s been a great couple of years and 100% wouldn’t have been able to do it or get to where we are without you.”

— Russel Lau, Site Optimisation Analyst, ASDA George