Beer Hawk increases conversion rate for repeat buyers by 35%

INDUSTRY: FOOD & BEVERAGE
PLATFORM: MAGENTO
Beer Hawk is the UK’s leading craft beer retailer, offering a highly curated range of over 1,000 of the best craft and speciality beers.
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Challenge:
Beer Hawk team sought to learn how much their personalized product recommendations are increasing conversion rate
Learn moreSolution:
A/B Testing and Optimisation measures performance between general recommendations and behavior-based recommendations
Learn moreResults:
A 35% lift in conversion for repeat buyers and a 14% lift in conversion for first-time buyers
Learn moreAbout Beer Hawk
Beer Hawk is the UK’s leading craft beer retailer, offering a highly curated range of over 1,000 of the best craft and speciality beers from around the world, via a “pick n’ mix” selection, discovery cases, a monthly beer subscription club and a large selection of beery gifts. Their mission is to inspire their customers to discover their next favourite beer.
Challenge
Beer Hawk’s team understands the importance of personalisation, as can be seen by their decision to work with Nosto in the first place, but they were curious to learn exactly how much certain personalized details affect the bottom line.
As their most robust personalized content initiative at the time, it made sense for the Beer Hawk team to first figure out how much their personalized product recommendations are increasing their conversion rate.
“We’re especially happy with Nosto’s A/B Testing & Optimisation because it’s clearly built for commerce, and supports use cases that are not usually a focus for other testing platforms. Better understanding customer behaviour is one of our key initatives, so the seamless integration of this testing tool with their product recommendations makes it a great solution for us!”
David Haynes, Senior Digital Product Manager at Beer Hawk
Solution
When Beer Hawk first learned of Nosto’s new A/B Testing and Optimisation, they were excited to give it a try. Due to their internal culture of robust experimentation, they quickly began building out a test to see how different variations of personalised product recommendations affect their conversion rates.
The Beer Hawk team set up their test to measure how recommendations that are tied to actual customer behavior (such as beer type preference) performed compared to more general recommendations (such as similar products or affordable add-ons) when they appear on the cart page.

Once the test achieved significance, Beer Hawk dissected the results by segment to uncover more useful insights (such as whether Variation A performed better than Variation B, or vice-versa). This deeper dive led to Beer Hawk discovering that not only do the more personalised recommendations increase conversion rates for both first-time customers and repeat loyal customers, but they also increase average order value within both segments.
The brand then replicated the test on their homepage in order to increase visibility and learn if the page location of the recommendations would change the results. The conclusion was the same, and Beer Hawk now knew how to optimise for both a higher conversion rate and average order value within two of their key segments.

Products used:
Results
Beer Hawk increased their conversion rates for multiple segments within their customer base by implementing product recommendation title A/B tests using Nosto’s A/B Testing & Optimization. After measuring how recommendations that are tied to actual customer behavior performed compared to more general recommendations appearing on the cart page, as well as replicating the test on their homepage to learn the impact of page location, the brand achieved:
- a 35% lift in conversion rate for repeat buyers
- a 14% lift in conversion rate for first-time buyers
35 %
lift in conversion rate for repeat buyers
14 %
lift in conversion rate for first-time buyers