Timex attributes +20.4% revenue lift during peak holiday season to adaptive experience optimization

Timex story

Timex was established in 1854 as the Waterbury Clock Company. At the time it turned a 300-year-old industry upside down. They stamped gears out of metal, instead of carving them from wood. They made smaller, more accurate movements faster than ever before. In fact, even Detroit’s automakers were inspired by their assembly lines when the automobile became a thing.

Timex Milan-based design director Giorgio Galli knows what makes Timex tick better than anything else. Every Timex starts with a careful consideration of company legacy and a passion to blaze forward. In 2019, Timex asked Giorgio to create a watch that brings to life everything Timex stands for — in other words, to create the most “Timex” Timex ever made. He answered with the S1 Automatic.

Watchmaking is back in the USA. S1 is drop forged in US-sourced stainless steel by auto parts manufacturers, and assembled in their Connecticut Headquarters with a high-quality Swiss movement. What started as an impossible idea is now a Timex watch made in America.

Before

Conventional wisdom among eCommerce companies is to run A/B or multivariate tests during the regular shopping season to optimize online customer experiences.

They then freeze the code and do not actively experiment during the holidays. Companies fear that the risks associated with trying new ideas during the high revenue season will outweigh the benefits.

CHALLENGE

After years of experiencing positive conversion rate optimization results with Obviyo’s growth marketing platform and its adaptive experience optimization capabilities, Timex Group management was concerned about the performance of optimization results during the holiday season.

Since they were freezing the code and stopping live experiments during the holidays, Timex was essentially ‘turning off the lights’, preventing them from getting a handle on shopping and buying patterns during peak holiday season. They suspected that visitor behavior and preferences during the holidays were different but they could not measure it.

After

Obviyo’s growth marketing platform provides a fully integrated data platform, personalization, and experience optimization capabilities. In this case, the Timex team was using the data platform and adaptive optimization features of the solution. Used together, they enable large scale experimentation with many A/B tests running in parallel, powered by adaptive algorithms and deep data insights.

SOLUTION

Years of positive results when using Obviyo’s adaptive experience optimization capabilities during the regular season, gave the Timex team the confidence needed to continue with live optimization during peak holiday season.

The image below shows a few A/B treatments that ran during the holiday season.

All were simple changes introduced to experiment with the existing page elements:

• Cross Sell: Move product recommendations higher on the page
• Photo Share: Make user-created content more prominent
• Mini Cart: Modify layout and mini cart content
• Distractions: Remove several auxiliary elements, like reviews or social links from the product selection area

Results

Time period: October 1 – January 9

Looking at the results below one would conclude that all treatments were positive and that the conversion rate optimization campaign performed very well.

Time interval segmentation of results reveals a completely different picture.

Let’s examine shopping behavior before, during and after the holiday season.

BEFORE: October 1 – November 24

Treatments included in this study were not performing well:

DURING HOLIDAY SEASON: November 25 – December 24

The same treatments performed extremely well:

Net Revenue Lift: +20.4%

AFTER: December 25 – January 9

Post season results were marginal: