Matalan saw a +400% ROI within 9 months of using Hotjar

In just 9 months using Hotjar, Matalan: 

• improved checkout conversions by +1.23% after fixing issues highlighted by Session Recordings;

• saw a +17% increase in the number of winning AB tests based on user-driven data collected with Incoming Feedback and Polls;

• built a bespoke Hotjar dashboard with Google Data Studio, which has transformed the decision-making process within the company;

• delivered +400% ROI by resolving the issues highlighted by Hotjar findings. 

With over 200 stores and a newly redesigned ecommerce website, their mission is “to provide outstanding value for modern families”—and they have been using Hotjar to make sure their online customers have the same positive browsing and shopping experience they would have in store.

Karl Rowlands (UX Manager), Lucy Walton (UX Optimization Analyst) and Darryl Monks (UX Designer/Developer) manage customer feedback, conversion rate optimization, and the overall UX experimentation roadmap on matalan.co.uk. We caught up with them to hear about how Hotjar has impacted their team and the overall business.

Challenges

Matalan created a User Experience function for their ecommerce site, assembling a team just under 2 years ago to ensure that they always have the user at the heart of their business.

The team Karl and Lucy belong to started out on a limited budget, and only had access to quantitative data; the closest they came to qualitative insight was user surveys, which back then they found costly and rather intrusive for their users. The team also struggled with the time it took to onboard new tools into their tech stack, due to existing corporate governance policies.

As a result, most of the initial decision-making was based on intuition and gut feel, rather than on solid data points. Although they tracked and measured the impact of the changes they were making, Karl and Lucy never knew the reasons behind the impact in the first place.

There was a large gap in how and why decisions were made, and that gap was user feedback:

“We didn't really understand exactly why things were happening. So we knew that we needed a tool that would help us understand what our customers think, and understand the why behind everything we do.”

How Hotjar Helped

Initially, Karl and Lucy looked to Hotjar as a solution to survey their customers in a non-intrusive manner. As Matalan moved from an adaptive website to a fully responsive solution, the team used Hotjar to capture insights pre- & post- migration, so they could understand their customers’ reaction to the change.   Pretty soon, they started seeing the value in other tools in the Hotjar suite. For example, session recordings allowed them to spot bugs and glitches and resolve them early on, rather than at the end of the migration process. They also used Incoming Feedback to identify issues, and watched the companion recordings to see individual journeys leading to them.

In doing so, they found a few holes in the checkout process. Resolving one of the bugs identified led them to a fantastic result: they improved checkout conversion by +1.23%.

Relying more and more on Hotjar to create user-driven hypotheses for their A/B tests, Karl & Lucy saw a +17% increase in the number of their winning experiments. They also decided to build a bespoke dashboard to integrate Incoming feedback within Google Data Studio: their UX Experience Dashboard allows the team to drill deeper into each piece of feedback they get, categorise them by theme, and assign ownership to other stakeholders across the business.