How Norwegian Air got over 10x ROI on their investment, twice

About the Customer

Norwegian Air Shuttle was founded in 1993 - with the idea of low fare prices for all and a smarter way to offer travel choices. They offer flight routes to more than 100 destinations, mainly in Europe.

The Challenge

In the competitive airline industry, every website conversion is priceless. In 2018, the airline company Norwegian realized that CRO was a must in order to become more competitive. At the time, web data from the digital customer journey existed but was not used to its full potential.

The organization lacked methods and processes to make data-driven business decisions based on customer data to meet the customer need. The assignment for Conversionista was to establish an experimentation program that would increase sales, but above all, drive Norwegian forward in its goal of becoming a customer-centric & data-driven organization.

The Solution

The assignment started with a thorough Conversion Review of the website. Web analysis, web psychology and qualitative studies were analyzed to form strong insights and recommendations. With a review of more than 100 pages of insights, the foundation was laid to shape an experimentation program whose main task was to solve online customers’ issues.

Within every low-cost company, every dime spent is extremely important to get a return on. Therefore, a ”proof-of-concept” work was started by Conversionista to demonstrate the potential value of a well-functioning experimentation program. After a successful proof of concept with positive sales figures, an experimentation team was formed from Conversionista’s various expert skills. The goal for our consultants was to form a cross-functional research and experiment team to independently run the experiment process on their own. Clear KPIs of test and sales figures were set together with the client to achieve a certain ROI on the experimental program’s testing.

The Implementation

Conversionista’s consultants’ first task was to ensure that the program had development resources that were prioritized for A/B testing, and as a part of the solution a decision was made to involve the development agency Opti Phoenix which specializes in A/B test development.

In order to achieve the goals of the test program, an upgrade of Norwegian’s test tools was required to remove unnecessary bottlenecks. Conversionista assisted with expertise in the work of finding the right tool with its functionality, scalability and price level.

With help from the Conversion Review, a development team without backlog queues, and a new scalable testing tool, the focus was now on streamlining the experimentation team’s own processes. At Conversionista we work with two KPIs in each customer assignment of optimizing experimentation programs, quality and velocity of the program’s output. Quality is the number of tests that result in significant results that decision-makers can use to make data-driven decisions. Velocity is the number of tests the program produces during a time interval. The combination of the two of them tells the story of how well the experimentation program is performing.

Throughout this client assignment, the program implemented incremental improvements to both its quality and velocity, resulting in a fast-paced winning machine!

Example

Results

All the process improvements that Conversionista implemented ensured that the experimental program maintained a high level of quality and velocity. With over 150 A/B tests and a great win rate, the result of the program was an estimate of over NOK 500 million pre-pandemic in added sales to Norwegian. After the pandemic it continued to increase, giving the project an ROI of over 10x both pre and post pandemic.

In 2022, Norwegian’s CRO team was nominated for ”Best Experimentation Practice” award at the Nordics and Continental Europe Optimizer Awards. In 2023, Director Ecommerce and Digital at Norwegian Air, Dina Doder won “Conversion Hero of The Year” at our own Conversion Jam.