Missguided experiments to make bold business decisions

How experimentation, personalization and recommendations are driving the fast-growing UK fashion brand forward

Missguided has over 10,000 products available online at any one time and offers up to 1,000 new styles each week. It is known for its ingenious and fresh approach to both fashion and business. Everything Missguided creates is informed by its customer along with global influences like social media, street style, and popular culture.

Its innovative way of running the company as well as its ambitious digital strategy allowed Missguided to obtain a competitive advantage over other fashion retailers in a very short time.

Offering the right look customer by customer

To maintain and expand its position in the fast-moving retail market, it is essential Missguided understands what its customers want. With the goal of creating an excellent and unique experience for every customer in mind, the digital team at Missguided turned to Optimizely in 2016. To help deliver on its customer-first mission, Missguided has since been using Optimizely for online experimentation, personalization and recommendations.

Driving innovation through experimentation in all areas of the business

At Missguided experimentation is playing a key role in optimising the customer experience, driving sales and mitigating the risk of introducing bold new service offerings. Optimizely is being used by various teams across the organization to leverage online experiments in many different use cases.

One group of experiments was focused on testing how customers respond to different types of product badging using images vs. live text to highlight new products, items back in stock, and special collections such as petite or plus size. Deploying the most successful badging type resulted in a 300% uplift in click-through rates for featured products.

Another area of experimentation was led by the ‘Studio’, the team responsible for website imagery within Missguided. Aiming to better understand how customers react to visuals, the team used Optimizely to test if customers would like to ‘shop the look’, view 360-degree spins or hover over images, resulting in a significant increase in conversions.

Trusting that experimentation is a viable method of evaluating business models, Missguided also decided to test a new premium service, that offers unlimited free next day delivery for a year. To manage the risk associated with the new service and to check its commercial value, this offering was first made available to a small group of customers. With Optimizely data showing a conversion uplift of 177%, ‘unicorn delivery’ was soon rolled out to the entire customer base.

Making it personal

Delivering a personalized shopping experience to every visitor is contributing to Missguided’s growing customer base. Deriving insights from customer data and behavior allows the brand to tailor each customer journey.

Greeting returning customers by their first name is the most basic level of personalization at Missguided. With data about what a customer has recently viewed or purchased on the website, what products they added to their wish list and if they have a VIP status, Missguided can segment its audiences and develop personalized offers and promotions to capitalise on customer interest.

A particularly successful campaign was targeted at ‘rising star’ customers, those on the cusp of becoming Missguided VIPs based on the number and frequency of purchases as well as site visits. Targeting them with exclusive offers, such as buying three items to get 30% off, allowed Missguided to convert these customers to the company’s most valuable VIPs.

With the move to the high street, Missguided also used location-based data to promote their physical stores. For the launch of Missguided’s store in London’s Westfield shopping centre, London-based customers were targeted with a special click-and-collect offer through a website banner and received push notifications about the opening and special promotion

Coming highly recommended

To complement these personalization efforts, Missguided also offers personalized recommendations. Showing customers items that are most relevant to them provides a better user experience and allows Missguided’s customers to find what they are looking for more easily.

The brand is currently experimenting with different recommendations on the homepage. While new visitors see trending items that other visitors most frequently viewed or bought, returning visitors see items that they previously browsed. When viewing a particular product, visitors are shown products that other visitors who viewed this product browsed or purchased.

What’s next?

To provide a seamless customer experience across devices, Missguided is working towards an omni-channel experimentation strategy that allows for optimization of its website as well as its mobile apps. To further improve the experience new functionalities are being investigated around sorting and filtering products.

Missguided wants to put experimentation at the heart of their strategy, removing ambiguity from the decision making process, and empowering a team that owns its own destiny.

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