216% uplift in conversions through data-driven experimentation
Founded in Belgium in 1990, Le Pain Quotidien is an international chain of bakery restaurants that has more than 250 locations across 17 countries. The brand prides itself on the quality of its ingredients and products, and delivers a memorable, in-store experience with its trademark long wooden “communal” tables.
With the support of November Five, Le Pain Quotidien launched their own e-commerce platform in 2020, offering customers a Click & Collect service.
Launching a product is a huge achievement for all those involved, but it’s just one milestone on a product’s overall journey. How a company steers a product’s course throughout its lifetime – from proactive improvements, to reactions to challenges like changing customer behaviour or new market entrants – makes a huge difference to its overall success.
As with any new product or service, Le Pain Quotidien found that having real-life customers use their recently launched Click & Collect system at scale revealed aspects that could be fine-tuned. It also gave them the chance to put some of their assumptions and supposed best practices to the ultimate test.
However, knowing which improvements they should focus on to deliver the best return on investment was a challenge. With the clock ticking, Le Pain Quotidien needed a way to turn assumptions into data-driven decisions about where to put their efforts.
As Le Pain Quotidien’s digital transformation partner – and having worked with them to develop their e-commerce platform – we already knew the product and the company’s business goals inside out. And with our multidisciplinary team, we had all the necessary growth engineering capabilities at our fingertips.
By setting up a clear process together with the LPQ team, we were able to identify the areas for improvement with the highest possible return on investment based on data and business goals. We then developed structured experiments to quickly test hypotheses in a low-risk environment. This meant the company could devote resources to fully implementing changes that would really move the needle.
Through a hands-on workshop with Le Pain Quotidien’s marketing team and by explaining the rationale behind every decision, we not only shared our knowledge and best practices, but could amplify that knowledge with industry-specific insights and expertise from the LPQ team themselves. The result was a true shift towards a more data- and experimentation-driven approach, with the team actively leveraging data from across the organisation to improve their service faster and smarter.
uplift in conversion rate
average cSat score
“Thanks to November Five, we’ve been able to identify improvements with tangible, quantifiable results that improve the business in weeks- not months- giving us the kind of continuous growth we need."
Chief Growth Officer at Le Pain Quotidien
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When everyone has an opinion about what to do, but no concrete data to base that opinion on, identifying the best way forward can be a slow, inefficient and costly process. Imagine using a shotgun to drive audience growth, shooting and praying you’ll hit the mark.
With Le Pain Quotidien, our goal was to enable a mindset shift towards a data and rapid-experimentation driven approach that would let them quickly test out hypotheses for improvements in a low-risk environment and validate assumptions before burning time and budget. In other words, we wanted to find the silver bullets that would work for Le Pain Quotidien specifically, replacing the shotgun with a sniper rifle.
For example, we used our data insights to improve one of the landing pages. With A/B testing we were able to prove our hypothesis with over 95% confidence and convert our efforts into tangible and measurable results. Instead of weeks discussing which new design would work best, we had the new landing page created, tested and live within just two weeks.
“Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” To ensure Le Pain Quotidien could pursue their data-driven growth path, we set about embedding the skills they would need to analyse the platform’s performance on an ongoing basis.
As well as explaining the rationale behind every decision we made, we organised a hands-on workshop with the marketing managers responsible for creating landing pages where we taught them how to use Hotjar’s behaviour analytics tools.
Seeing real-life data like heatmaps that show users’ clicks and actions gave the team new insights into how their customers were actually using the platform, and sparked ideas for improving the user experience and ultimately driving more conversions.
Remote growth workshop to upskill the internal team
Having a structured way to gather, rank, and test ideas – and hopefully uncover some high-impact, low-effort improvements that can deliver results fast – makes it a lot easier to confidently decide which efforts to focus on first.
Together with the digital marketing team, we created a roadmap for all the experiments we identified, and prioritised them based on potential return on investment and effort.
By taking a standardised approach – each experiment starts with a hypothesis, defines what will be measured, and sets the criteria for success – we could clearly see which ideas were worth implementing on a larger scale, and which were not worth pursuing at all. This way the company could not only avoid spending large budgets for little return, but they could also retain agility in a fast-paced environment by making continuous small improvements.
