Enjoy Digital & Northern Trains – Full Steam to Shortlist Success

Enjoy Digital share their Global Digital Awards success and share their journey with Northern Trains.

When Northern Trains faced a drop in online ticket purchase conversions, the team knew that data, not assumptions, would lead the way forward.

Partnering with Enjoy Digital, they embarked on a transformative journey that has now earned them a finalist spot at the Global Digital Excellence Awards for Standout Use of Data.

This recognition celebrates not only great results but also the partnership, collaboration, and evidence-led creativity that made them possible. 

Who we are

Enjoy Digital is a full-service digital experience agency specialising in data-driven transformation, UX design, and conversion rate optimisation (CRO). We help brands grow by combining insight, creativity, and technology, always grounded in evidence.

Our partnership with Northern Trains, one of the UK’s leading regional train operators, began with a shared goal of enhancing the customer journey, increasing digital conversions, and building a repeatable framework for continuous improvement.

The challenge

Post-pandemic shifts in travel behaviour, cost-of-living pressures, and widespread industrial strike action have hit the rail industry hard. For Northern Trains, this significantly impacted their online ticket sales.

Despite increasing web traffic, customers weren’t converting. The data revealed that mobile users made up 77% of site traffic but were 34% less likely to start or complete a booking, a clear signal that the mobile experience wasn’t meeting expectations.

Northern’s digital goals were ambitious:

• Increase conversion rate
• Improve usability across key journeys
• Promote Northern’s unique selling points (no booking fees, flexible ticketing, and value-for-money travel)

We needed to rebuild confidence, improve usability, and show measurable growth, all without undertaking a costly platform overhaul.

The data-driven strategy

Our approach began with deep data discovery and alignment across teams, including:

• Stakeholder immersion workshops to define goals and success measures
• Quantitative and qualitative user research
• Remote usability testing with diverse audiences to reveal behavioural blockers
• UX audits highlighting friction points, especially on mobile

The findings were powerful. Many users viewed the site as purely transactional, unaware of Northern’s strong value propositions such as ‘no booking fees’ and ‘ticket swap from £1.50’. These insights became the foundation of the optimisation roadmap. 

Creativity rooted in evidence

Enjoy Digital implemented a programme of rapid, insight-led experimentation, prioritised using the ICE method (Impact, Confidence, Effort). Each test was grounded in real user behaviour, validated through research, and measured through live data before being scaled up.

Key experiments included:

• Booking form redesign featuring improved field hierarchy, calendar usability, and autocomplete logic
• Global USP bar and contextual panels surfacing Northern’s unique benefits across key pages
• Adding a sticky ‘Buy Tickets’ button

Rather than one major overhaul, these changes created compounding, incremental growth, proving the power of continuous experimentation.

Results that speak for themselves

The collaboration delivered sustained growth and transformation:

• 33% increase in online revenue
• 77% uplift in overall conversion rate
• 47% experiment success rate (versus an industry average of 25-30%)

These outcomes demonstrate that when data and creativity work hand-in-hand, even the most complex challenges can become opportunities for long-term success.

In their own words

“It’s been a pleasure working with Enjoy on our CRO journey. They’ve spent time getting to know our market and customers and created tests that have helped increase our conversions and improve our customers’ journeys. They build their tests based on data and user-tested evidence, which has given fruitful results for the Northern website. We’re really enjoying the partnership and looking forward to where the journey will take us.”
— Sam I’Anson, Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Northern Trains

“We are incredibly proud of the results we’ve accomplished with Northern. This project demonstrates the power of a collaborative and insight-driven approach to CRO, directly translating our efforts into tangible increases in conversion rates and a more effective digital experience for Northern’s customers.”
— Mark Richards, Head of Insights & Planning, Enjoy Digital

What being shortlisted means to us

Being named a finalist for the Global Digital Excellence Awards in the Standout Use of Data category is a huge honour for both Enjoy Digital and Northern Trains.

It’s a recognition of the shared commitment to data, insight, and meaningful digital transformation, and proof that you don’t need the biggest budgets or the flashiest tools to make a measurable difference.

This shortlisting shows that better decisions are made with better data.

Our experience with the Global Digital Excellence Awards

The entry process was clear, professional, and inspiring. The Don’t Panic Team made participation simple, from submission guidance to communication updates. It’s fantastic to see an awards programme that genuinely celebrates the role of data in driving digital excellence, and we’re thrilled to be part of it.

• Explore the project: https://www.enjoy-digital.co.uk/work/northern-trains/
• Connect with us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/enjoy-digital/