How one of UK's largest commercial services provider used CRO to ramp up lead generation engine

About

JLA is the UK & Ireland's leader in commercial equipment services. Started in 1973 as a family business from the English county of West Yorkshire (where it is still headquartered), the company currently employs nearly 800 employees across UK and Ireland. It received financial backing from Europe based private equity group HgCapital in 2010 and is currently one of the largest commercial services provider in UK and Ireland.

 

Problem statement

JLA sells to large and mid-sized businesses who have a considerable physical presence and may require any of the commercial services i.e. laundry, heating or catering that JLA provides. Therefore, lead generation is the key activity of the marketing function. To achieve that, the internal marketing team already invests in conventional mediums like PPC and SEO.

Now, they wanted to move a step back and optimize the lead generation assets that they already have. They started exploring CRO and landed on Freshmarketer.

Daniel would only later tell us that he had landed on Freshmarketer after having tasted almost all popular CRO. But we shall come to that later.

Long story short, the necessity for a CRO tool primarily emerged from the need to ramp up the lead generation engine. Let’s learn what they did

 

Freshmarketer effect

The job description of any CRO practitioner hovers between lot-of-tests and lot-and-lot-of-tests. Daniel and team fall in the latter category. Because it has been only 4 months since they deployed Freshmarketer and they have run 118 experiments already.

In the rest of the post, we are going to discuss some handpicked experiments they ran and the learnings from it.

A/B Test

Hypothesis- Changing the icon display on the product page would increase clicks.

Daniel tried 3 variations over the existing UI as displayed below:

 

The results were statistically significant and immediately informed the team what to prioritize in their next UI iteration.

Heatmap

JLA sells only to enterprise customers and their offering is fairly limited. So they only have a handful of pages on their website but the ticket size is relatively high. Since they don’t have as many pages, it is easier for them, if not necessary to monitor all the pages on their web property.

So to get the qualitative insight on all their pages, Danil ran heatmap on all them. This gave him a tremendous insight into the performance of each page and primed him for his next set of tests.

 

Session Replay

Like Heatmap, Daniel ran ‘Session Replay’ too on all the pages. If you are not sure of what ‘session replay’ does envisage your website as a physical property with CCTVs all over that records every single movement within the premises.

While your analytics tool gives you quantitative insight into the behavior of the user, Session replay helps you record the actual behavior- a supreme leverage if you are out to make some important product decisions.

With respect to Session replay, Daniel had this beautiful feedback to share which thrilled our developers who have worked truly hard to ensure that our screen recording never has any ‘broken bits’.

 

Closing thoughts

JLA is not traditionally an internet-based company or product. They are an offline business with just a solid web property for lead generation. It is sort of rare to find companies of such pedigree explore something like CRO which is unfortunately alien to even many hardcore internet based products.

So, when someone like JLA such keen interest in CRO, it warms our heart. May the power of data be with them.

Testimonial