Missguided is an online British fashion retailer with an attitude. Everything about Missguided is infused with a fun, playful irreverence. They don’t politely ask their visitors to shop their collection for the new year, they tell their customers to cure their fashion hangover and to start the new year with a fashion detox.

Missguided is focused on attracting young shoppers, and their bold brand helps them stand out from the competition and attract their target demographic (young females).

In many ways, Missguided is the quintessential modern ecommerce company:

• They have a global footprint (ship to 160+ countries)
• Operate multiple localized international sites
• Strong multi-platform ecommerce presence (desktop, tablet, phone)
• Focussed on using technology to adapt to changing consumer behaviors
• Has a wide range of products available for sale

Missguided has a comprehensive ecommerce optimization and personalization strategy—and it’s paying off. In less than one year, Missguided has achieved the following results:

• 38% conversion-rate increase
• 19% improvement to customer-retention rates
• 36% boost to add-to-cart rates
• £4 million incremental revenue increase

Missguided’s ecommerce optimization strategy: test, react, maximize.

The world of fashion is fast—and it’s only getting faster. Missguided has 6,000+ live products at any given moment, and refreshes as many as 1,000 products/month. With so many available products, the primary goal of Missguided’s tests are to ensure customers are discovering the best products for them, in the most efficient way possible.

As Mark Leach, Missguided’s ecommerce lead, puts it:

“Monetate has had a huge impact on our ability to deliver and execute our customer-focused strategy. As well as having a flexible platform to quickly create and deploy content, the insight and strategic advice by the Monetate services team has been of enormous benefit.”

Missguided uses that flexibility to execute a variety of ecommerce tactics and personalization initiatives to achieve their goals. 

6 Key Tactics for Ecommerce Optimization

1. Visual Search

Missguided uses the Monetate Visual Search feature to make it easier for shoppers to identify the types of items they’d like to purchase. Visual search boosts conversion rates and overall sales.

2. Countdown timers

Missguided uses countdown timers to drive urgency and inform shoppers of the close of a sale. Countdown timers also boost conversion rates and overall sales.

3. Product badges

Missguided uses badges to emphasize timely messages (such as “Now in stock!”) on product gallery pages. Product badges boost conversion rates and overall sales.

4. Cross-channel consistency

Missguided optimizes their ad budget by making sure messages that are promoted in PPC campaigns are carried over to the website shopping experience, too. This improves new-visitor conversion rates for Missguided.

5. Intelligent cross-promotions

Missguided uses behavioral targeting to make personalized cross-promotions and to expose them to the full range of products available. One particular example is a campaign they ran to promote shoes to customers who have never browsed their footwear selection before. This resulted in an increase in sales in the UK, Australia, and the U.S.

6. Smart shipping notifications

Missguided provides location-aware shipping information, so customers can more easily tell if an item is available in their home country, and the expected speed at which they can expect their purchase.

Ecommerce personalization: Bigger than the sum of its parts.

When you add dynamic segmentation and advanced localization to the three points listed above, the result is an effective personalized shopping experience. Missguided has also found new uses for website optimization beyond improving ecommerce metrics like conversion and bounce rate.

As Leanne Fyffe, Missguided’s Optimization Specialist explains:

“We have a real passion for personalisation and are continuously seeing the value it adds to our business. As well as being able to offer our large, expanding customer base the best possible experience, we’ve also been able to use Monetate to set better business goals. We started out with just one team member using the platform but with a true personalisation strategy in place, we’ve seen benefits across the whole company.”

What Leanne’s getting at here, is Missguided’s use of testing to help optimize the actual product offering and the designs that make it into production. Missguided employs a robust testing strategy not only for conversion rate optimization, but for optimizing their buying model, too. The Missguided website serves as a quick and reliable indicator of which styles customers dig, and which they don’t. With those insights in hand, they can better adapt to new trends and customer desires.

It’s an example of how ecommerce personalization and website optimization can work hand-in-hand to improve the customer’s shopping experience and business efficiency.

For more, check out the full list of Monetate case studies.