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lastminute.com appoints Maxymiser as strategic partner for conversion management

lastminute.com appoints Maxymiser as strategic partner for conversion management

lastminute.com, the UK’s leading online travel and leisure retailer, has announced a strategic partnership with conversion management expert, Maxymiser, to boost online sales and provide customers with a more personalised shopping experience.

Following a three-way competitive pitch, lastminute.com selected Maxymiser’s conversion management suite, including content optimisation, personalisation and consultancy services, in order to generate significant additional reach and revenue for the business. Maxymiser will also play a central role in helping lastminute.com to review, refine and enhance its ongoing conversion management strategy.

lastminute.com is widely recognised as one of the most successful e-commerce businesses, offering customers last-minute holidays, flights and hotel rooms, as well as unique lifestyle options, such as tickets to events, restaurant reservations and gifts. Initially, Maxymiser will be running A/B and multivariate tests (MVT) across the landing pages of the lastminute.com website, trialling different web page layouts, sequences and content on each page. These tests will help to improve the number of customers navigating further into the site and create a more engaging online experience for customers at every stage. 

Richard Spencer, Customer Experience Manager at lastminute.com explains, “As is the case with many e-tailers at present, improving conversion rates is a key focus for lastminute.com, however being able to sustain the increase in conversion uplift was pivotal to us. As such, we were keen to select a strong strategic partner who could not only work in collaboration with us to lead the effort from both a creative and technical perspective but also understand how each change would impact on our business and ensure all tests were designed to meet our over-arching objective of achieving long-term gains, rather than being too focused on generating quick wins. We invited several companies to pitch for our business but selected Maxymiser due to the combination of their technology, service and integration capability. They are also 100% focused on providing conversion management solutions and they have a very flexible, ‘can do’ approach which gives them a real competitive edge.”

Spencer continues, “Multivariate Testing is now widely recognised as a methodology for increasing online conversions, and it has been proven to deliver an excellent return on investment.  This, coupled with the fact that Maxymiser offer a fully managed service which effectively removes the risk from our investment, made the decision to work with Maxymiser a relative easy one.”

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Following the initial testing lastminute.com is planning to instil the culture of MVT throughout other aspects of the company’s customer experience function and use regular testing in its marketing and engagement project lifecycles. Spencer explains, “We spend a lot of time trying to create the optimum creative solution and we can waste time debating this internally. The best way to actually find out what works is by showing three or four different ideas to our visiting customers and let them tell us which works best.”

Mark Simpson, Founder and Managing Director of Maxymiser comments, “The insight that our solutions can provide can fundamentally change a business – instead of having to make educated guesses, lastminute.com will now be able to make sure that what they are providing is precisely what their customers want and is presented in the most accessible way possible. It is encouraging to see many brands now implementing the tools and technology available to enable them to stand out in today’s crowded online marketplace. Conversion management is now an essential part of the marketing mix for any online business.”

Spencer concludes, “Maxymiser’s strength is their whole package, from creative ideas and consultancy, to technology, project management and business analysis, and this is why we chose them as our strategic partner for conversion management. Although it is still early in our relationship the exposure we have had to the team has been fantastic. They are excellent at what they do and have a proven track record working with other leading brands such as ASDA and Waterstone’s; they know what they are talking about and we are confident that their commitment to improving our customer experience with us will pay dividends.”