Delivering an 18x return on investment for Gousto by kick-starting their CRO program

Gousto had an unusual problem.

As the UK’s leaders in food recipe subscription services, they are hugely popular. In fact, they are so popular that they were operating at capacity and couldn’t increase their customer base significantly.

But as a Venture Capital backed business, they still had growth targets to hit. So instead of growing their customer base, their short-term targets were instead focused on increasing average order value.

Gousto had tried experimentation in the past – but had decided it wasn’t for them. They’d bought a licence for Optimizely, but after a few unsuccessful attempts, it wasn’t being used.

That’s where Conversion came in. As their VP of Digital Product had worked with Conversion before, he’d seen first-hand their experience in turning customer insights into results.

We worked with the Gousto team to optimize their customer experience: utilising principles of behavioral economics to improve performance. After contributing some incredibly positive results, we believed we could extend this advantage by focusing on Gousto’s marketplace – where they’d sell third-party products like wine, beer and desserts.

The results were clear – this one experiment increased highly-profitable ancillary sales by a massive 20%.

We positively iterated on this result, and continued a run of winning experiments testing across the site to increase AOV.

Gousto were so impressed with the work being delivered, that after just five months of working together, they asked us to expand our remit to focus on acquisition in the subscription funnel, and also optimizing for customer retention – resulting in an 18x return on investment in just 18 months.

20%

Increase in ancillary sales with one experiment

18x

Return on investment in just 18 months