Sussex Cricket Club Case Study

Sussex Cricket Club is the oldest professional sports club in the world and one of the eighteen first-class county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales. It’s Limited Over team is called the Sussex Sharks, and they’re also a big champion of Disability Cricket, with the D40 (Disability) and VI (Visually Impaired) squads supported by their charitable arm, The Sussex Cricket Foundation.

When Sussex Cricket Club first engaged with Webtrends Optimize, they were completely new to CRO. They had recently redesigned their website, and whilst this improved the look and feel of the site, there was still work to be done in tailoring the user experience and improving sales.

Sussex Cricket Club’s site attracted visitors interested in fixtures/tickets, squad information and news updates, but there was not a high conversion rate, even though there were opportunities for visitors to purchase tickets, as well as membership, sponsorship and hospitality packages.

Sussex Cricket Club expressed their desire to increase the amount of people who reached the booking funnel through their website. There was already the technical functionality to do this on their website, but there wasn’t much interaction with it.

Webtrends Optimize ran a whole optimisation programme across the site to reach some specific goals. This included conducting tests to:

1. Draw more users into the booking funnel
2. Improve the visibility of the navigation bar (specifically to get to the hospitality, membership and sponsorship pages)
3. Increase enquiries on the hospitality page

For the booking funnel, an ABn test was run for 20 days.

On mobile, the ‘Book Now’ button was displayed in the top navigation and on desktop the ‘Book Tickets’ icon was made more prominent. It was thought that ‘Book Tickets’ should always be visible on the website to enable more visitors to reach the Ticketmaster booking funnel.

An additional ABn test was run for 41 days where secondary navigation with a quick access bar to the hospitality, membership and sponsorship pages was added to the site.

The hypothesis here was that by bringing the links to the key commercial products into the top navigation, it will increase their visibility and improve the chances of getting the visitors to book them.

For the third objective (more visitors submitting enquiries on the hospitality page), to make the packages not only more visible, but more useable when users did get there, we ran an AB test for 28 days with the goal of increasing the prominence of booking options, utilising hero banners and a dynamic promo-banner.

The project involved redesigning the hospitality page, adding an image gallery and increasing the visibility of the enquiry and download buttons. Call To Action Buttons were also added above the fold, so they were more visible and easily accessible.

All of the tests from the Conversion Rate Optimisation programme had some really good results.

By making the ‘Book Tickets’ icon more prominent and changing it to a blue ticket icon, the result was a 69.22% lift in clicks on the tickets link. This meant an additional 1,360 visitors would reach the Ticketmaster booking funnel each quarter.

The test to increase the number of visitors reaching the hospitality, membership and sponsorship pages were run on desktop and mobile. On desktop, there was a 511.74% lift in visitors to the membership page and a 462.52% lift in visitors to the hospitality page.

On mobile, there was 103.29% lift in visitors to the hospitality page and a 30.59% lift in clicks on the tickets icon and progressing to the Ticketmaster funnel. This test is expected to mean an additional 165 members reaching the hospitality page each quarter.

As a result of the changes to the hospitality page, there was a 22.04% lift on users reaching the booking funnel on all devices. We were able to conclude that based on a similar level of traffic, the optimal could drive more than 147 additional visitors to the hospitality funnel each quarter.