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Winning the Digital Race: The Jockey Club’s Optimization Journey

The Jockey Club continues to push the boundaries of digital innovation, leveraging experimentation, personalization, and seamless integrations to enhance the customer experience. In this latest installment of 'Customer Confidential', Sarah Haynes, Head of Digital Product at The Jockey Club, shares how they’ve optimized ticketing, streamlined the checkout process, and introduced data-driven personalization—transforming the way customers engage with their platform. Through a strategic partnership with dotcraft and the power of Optimizely, they’re shaping a more intuitive, efficient, and engaging digital journey.

Optimizing the track: The Jockey Club’s data-driven digital transformation

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Key Points:

  • The Jockey Club uses two-week sprint cycles and tools like Jira to manage projects, working closely with agency dotcraft to prioritize and release updates efficiently.

  • Analytics and testing are central to decision-making, with a focus on monitoring performance, conversion rates, and refining testing plans for continuous improvement.

  • With 365 days of events, the team ensures seamless website and app performance to drive ticket sales and maintain user experience.

Enhancing digital experiences with a customer-first approach

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Key Points:

  • The Jockey Club consolidated 26 websites into one centralized CMS, streamlining operations and improving customer experience.

  • Every project focuses on solving customer problems, from native checkouts to site rebrands, ensuring a seamless journey.

  • Working closely with agency dotcraft, the team delivers impactful projects, blending long hours with rewarding results.

What I love with product is you're always putting the customer first. Everything you're doing is looking at what is a problem for the customer, how do we solve it?
Sarah Haynes - Head of Digital Product, The Jockey Club

Unifying 26 websites to one seamless digital experience

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Key Points:

  • The Jockey Club previously managed 26 separate websites, leading to inconsistent branding, resource inefficiencies, and a lack of unified analytics.

  • They consolidated all websites into one "mothership" platform, enabling cross-selling opportunities and a seamless customer experience.

  • Launched 14 new apps to complement the website, ensuring a consistent and enhanced experience from pre-race planning to on-course engagement.

We call it the big mothership website... it gave you a chance to cross-sell. If someone wanted to go racing, you’re not pushing them down one way—now they have different options.
Sarah Haynes - The Jockey Club

Driving conversions and efficiency: The Jockey Club’s CMS overhaul

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Key Points:

  • The Jockey Club prioritized faster page speeds and better SEO performance, leveraging Optimizely’s capabilities to meet Google’s performance standards.
  • Optimizely’s block-based CMS allowed for flexible page templates, enabling easier testing and improved usability without overhauling entire page structures.
  • A key goal was optimizing the customer journey for ticket purchases, making it quicker and more efficient for users to complete transactions.

Creating a cohesive, mobile-first experience with Optimizely CMS

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Key Points: 

  • Optimizely’s CMS ensures a cohesive digital experience, allowing each racecourse to maintain its unique identity while keeping branding uniform across the site.
  • A major navigation overhaul improved the user journey, using both primary and contextual navigation to help visitors find information quickly.
  • The Jockey Club prioritized a fully responsive design to ensure a seamless experience on any device.

Optimizing the customer journey: A/B testing at The Jockey Club

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Key Points:

  • The Jockey Club leverages analytics to identify pain points and run A/B tests, ensuring data-backed decisions that enhance site performance.
  • By experimenting with elements like CTAs, copy, and new payment methods, they optimize the purchase journey and improve conversion rates.
  • Surveys and sentiment analysis help The Jockey Club understand why users exit pages, allowing for immediate optimizations.

Experimentation helps us test in real time, so when we launch new experiences, we have confidence they’ll succeed.
Sarah Haynes - The Jockey Club

The Jockey Club’s agile development success with dotcraft

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Key Points:

  • The Jockey Club works iteratively with Optimizely partner dotcraft, launching new features in stages instead of waiting for full project completion.
  • Agile workflows provide clear visibility into progress, ensuring alignment across teams.
  • dotcraft acts as an extension of The Jockey Club’s team, contributing expertise, ideas, and long-term digital growth.

We’re not just launching projects—we’re continuously testing, optimizing, and improving with every release.
Sarah Haynes – The Jockey Club

The Power of flexible CMS integration for ticketing success

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Key Points:

  • Integrating Future Ticketing with Optimizely’s CMS allowed The Jockey Club to reduce steps in the purchase process and improve UI flexibility.
  • QuickPay options like Apple Pay and Google Pay, along with personalized upgrade suggestions, helped boost conversions and average order value.
  • A 33-second reduction in purchase time and a 19% increase in progression rates highlight the impact of the new system.

Expanding digital capabilities with Experimentation and Personalization

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The team has laid a strong foundation by optimizing the checkout experience and now plans to take personalization to the next level. By integrating a third-party tool that syncs customer data with Optimizely’s experimentation platform, they can deliver more tailored experiences based on user behavior and preferences.

Sarah's key advice for digital optimization success:

  1. Define Clear Goals – Establish what you want your platform to achieve and measure success accordingly.
  2. Leverage Analytics – Use data to understand user behavior, identify pain points, and refine the customer journey.
  3. Prioritize Customer Experience – Continuously ask whether changes truly benefit the end user.
  4. Engage Stakeholders – Gather insights from different teams, such as customer service, to address real-world challenges and enhance digital strategies.

Industry

Sports

Products used

In collaboration with:

a black and white sign
dotcrafted