Learning Launch

Challenge

I am currently working within the Product Team of an e-Commerce start-up, with a drinks  subscription business model. My job is to identify insights from our data, discover current  problems that our company might be facing and elaborate a strategy to potentially solve those  problems.

Right now we have a really important challenge: to improve our Average Order Value (amount  of money that each customer spends on an order). The Project includes two employees from  the Product Team, one from Marketing, one from Pricing & Assortment and the CEO of the  company. The main goal is to make our consumers spend more money in our website.

Selection

We chose the Learning Launch tool because, while brainstorming, we came up with really  great ideas but they were all based in assumptions that had not been tested before. This was a  huge question mark for us, because if we decided to implement an expensive solution based  on assumptions that were not tested, we were setting ourselves up for failure. We decided to  take our assumptions, build hypothesis and design different tests that would allow us to  validate them or iterate on them.

Application

First of all, we started by identifying all customer problems that might be causing our Average  Order Value to decrease: we found out that people were only looking for promotions and  discounts, they were not interested in our value proposition (free shipping, big assortment,  frozen prices).

For this, we started by talking to customers that had one order and then cancelled their  subscription (ocasional buyers) and customers that expressed in surveys that were looking for  other products in our assortment. Once we analyzed the qualitative and quantitative data, we  built our hypothesis.

Our hypothesis was that people were not spending money on our business because we had  communication issues, and we were implementing all our marketing campaigns based on one  product of our assortment because it was the one that brought most of our customers. The  thing is that these customers were only interested in that one attractive product, and they  were not profitable consumers for us: if we make an e-Mail campaign showing our consumers  that they can solve more than one need with our service they Will increase their Average  Order Value.

We designed the test and started to contact current consumers with communications that  showed our assortment.

We learned that consumers were not shifting consumption: the test did not validate our  hypothesis, so the team got back together again and we started to brainstorm about what  could we do.

Insights & Approach

By applying this tool we saved a lot of time and money: if we decided to implement these  communications at a larger scale, we would have had to spend a loto f marketing resources to  créate the communications and them analyze all the feedback received.

For that, we would have find out a Little too late that our customers were not willing to  increase their Average Order Value: we found out on the second time that we brainstormed  and used Learning Launch Tool that customers were willing to spend more if we solved a  bigger need, not just drinks – for example, if we added groceries products to our assortment.

I think that Learning Launch Tool is really valuable because it allows team to bring their  oppinions to the table in an organized way, and it allows brainstorming without having the  employees feel frustrated or overheard, or maybe shy because they think their ideas are not  Good enough.

