The e-commerce team at Clarins is a true “testing lab,” managing their 5 websites (Germany, Spain, Ireland, Benelux, and Portugal) and helping the other nearby countries to grow their e-commerce business. The goal of this ‘incubator’ is to create an internal community of experimenters to help share testing best practices. This approach paid off with the creation of the ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ a gamification concept launched on Singles Day, November 11, 2020.
While testing using AB Tasty was initiated by the International Content team, Clarins decided in 2020 to not only extend its partnership with AB Tasty to include a commercial component but also to expand to the regional and local level. The tool that the EMEA teams were using previously was limited to creating pop-ins, which wasn’t enough to tackle Clarins’ goals involving retention and personalization.
Personalization via gamification
For Célia Rigaux, E-Commerce Director, EMEA, this was an opportunity to instill a test and learn culture across the EMEA teams. “Our goal is to exchange with our customers, to create a link with them, and to inspire loyalty, by bringing them value through our websites. AB Tasty’s experimentation capabilities enable us to challenge our CRM, Acquisition, and E-store teams using innovative tests that we weren’t able to run before.”
With the strategic holiday season approaching, the time was right to launch a far-reaching test across all of the sites managed by the EMEA e-commerce team. Singles Day (celebrated on November 11 in many countries) was the perfect option, seeing as it was also only a few days before Black Friday. All that was left was to decide what kind of game to display.
Everyone’s a winner
At the end of September 2020, Clarins got in touch with their Customer Success Manager at AB Tasty to see if their idea was feasible. After a few exchanges, they decided on the right set-up that struck a perfect balance between technical feasibility and a smooth user experience.
The idea was simple: Every person who visits any of Clarins’ EMEA websites, whether on desktop or mobile, sees the game appear. If they click on it, the wheel spins and stops at one of 6 gifts. The gifts are promo codes, automatically applied to the winning visitor’s basket, which makes for a great user experience (especially on mobile). 
“We were able to launch our tests in two weeks,” explains Anaëlle Thomas, E-store Project Manager EMEA, who was responsible for the development of the project. One of the major advantages of AB Tasty was the ability to duplicate each experiment for each of Clarins’ sites. If the first test took 20 hours to implement, this number shrank by 5 for each of the other 4 sites. This experience is now live for all of the other countries Clarins’ is present in, and adaptable for other offers.
4x the orders
The first gamification test was a success for Clarins’ EMEA e-commerce team. The game, buoyed up by the increased web traffic brought on by the pandemic, performed very well. Live for 24 hours (from the 10th to the 11th in the evening), the total number of orders completed on the 4 main sites (Germany, Spain, Ireland and Benelux) quadrupled when compared to the results of November 11, 2019. Ireland stood out, with an order increase of +495% and a +585% increase in revenue.
The conversion rate did well, increasing by +89.34% compared to 2019. Finally, the add-to-basket rate increased by +145% compared to the 2020 average. It should be noted that, though the game performed well in all countries, it was Ireland that attracted the most visitors, with 61.37% of visitors trying their luck.
“We systematically test on all our sites to see how each country reacts according to the local culture. So we shared the success of this experiment with the other countries,” elaborated Anaëlle Thomas. “South Africa was particularly interested and launched their own version in December. The United Arab Emirates also ran the test during the 4 days of Black Friday.”
Pursuing personalization in 2021
Previously known mostly as an A/B testing tool, AB Tasty has attained the level of ‘business partner.’ The EMEA teams even share their experimentation tips via Teams. Next step: Further develop their personalization strategy, especially by learning from other AB Tasty clients’ experiences. See you in 2021!
“The ability to duplicate tests in AB Tasty allows us to exchange more often with the other EMEA countries and to share experiments. We rely on AB Tasty to guide us in driving our personalization strategy forward.”
– Célia Rigaux, E-Commerce Director, EMEA, Clarins
