About Robin and Björn Borg

As Global eCommerce Director, Robin and his team are responsible for harnessing data insights to drive strategic decisions, ensuring that Björn Borg’s online presence aligns with its evolving brand identity and customer expectations. Björn Borg is a Swedish apparel fashion brand named after a former professional tennis player. The brand focuses on underwear, sports apparel and bags as well as the licensing of footwear and eyewear. Its products are sold in over 20 markets worldwide. 

What are your key challenges and priorities?

Björn Borg’s evolution from a traditional underwear brand to a multifaceted sportswear brand brings unique challenges for Robin and his team. “The sportswear sector witnessed remarkable growth, with our online sales skyrocketing by almost 100% in 2023. This development demands a deep understanding of customer behavior and the quantification of data to inform data-driven decision-making”, shares Robin. 

What stood out most to you about Contentsquare?

Website analytics have been an important topic for the team at Björn Borg for a long time—they’re experienced in analyzing data, formulating hypotheses and conducting heatmap analyses to inform their decision-making. 

However, what they were lacking was the ability to really deep dive into customer behavior on their website and quantify the potential impact of changes. “Contentsquare has filled this void, providing us with a comprehensive suite of tools that keeps exceeding our expectations,” says Robin. 

Know what drives engagement and abandonment on your sites and mobile apps.

I want to start!

How does Contentsquare align with your wider business strategy?

Björn Borg’s eCommerce goals are very ambitious and growth-oriented. Robin explains that the team is even striving to exceed their targets, so allocating resources strategically and focusing on the areas with the highest potential impact is key. 

“Contentsquare plays a pivotal role, providing us with the insights and tools to optimize our efforts and drive measurable results.” – Robin Salazar, Global eCommerce Director at Björn Borg 

Which features does your team use the most or is looking forward to getting stuck into?

Robin’s team has diverse needs and varies according to each team member’s areas of expertise—but Contentsquare caters to them all. “I personally find CS Live particularly useful for getting a quick overview of customer engagement on the site, while my colleagues often dig deeper into the analysis using Session Replays or Customer Journey Analysis to uncover more detailed insights”, explains Robin. 

Where do you see Contentsquare supporting your eCommerce growth the most?

According to Robin, Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification shines as a prime example of how the tool contributes to Björn Borg’s business success. Robin elaborates: “We already gather lots of data on our conversion drivers but with Contentsquare, we can easily evaluate potential improvements and quantify their impact on our conversion rate.” This ability to measure the potential impact of changes makes decision-making and prioritizing initiatives significantly easier  and more efficient for Robin and his team. 

If you were to recommend Contentsquare to a contact in the industry, what would you say?

“I will make this short since my thoughts on Contentsquare are clear: You’ll gain access to more data than you can imagine— in a structured and accessible way, that empowers your whole team to drive action and make data-driven decisions”. —Robin Salazar, Global eCommerce Director at Björn Borg

The post How Contentsquare is supporting Björn Borg boost its eCommerce growth appeared first on Contentsquare.

In today’s challenging commerce landscape, understanding the customer – their needs, preferences and behaviors – is crucial. This detailed understanding is the key to providing relevant, personalized shopping experiences that ultimately help businesses stay competitive. Avensia’s commerce advisors have extensive experience supporting businesses with the strategies, processes and data analytics needed to optimize customer experiences and drive long-term customer loyalty. Now they can also offer the market leading end-to-end solution for digital experience insights. 

“The Contentsquare solution is a great addition to our tech portfolio, complementing our advisory services perfectly. We can now enable our customers to quickly dive deep into behavioral data to understand the root cause of problems and take actions that’ll have an immediate effect on their bottom line. Because holistic  customer insights mean smarter decision-making,”

Jens Axelsson, VP Customer Experience at Avensia

Together, Avensia and Contentsquare support Norwegian omnichannel fashion brand Stormberg. The brand has worked closely with the Avensia team since the launch of their current e-commerce site in 2021. Therefore, they tasked Avensia to support a better understanding of customer behavior and decision-making founded in data rather than a gut feeling.

“We trusted Avensia to recommend the best tool for our organization since they know our business, team and ambitions well. Together with Avensia and Contentsquare we are now taking a step into the future with detailed data insights and a complete understanding of our customers’ online behavior. This will help us stay on top of change, trends and most importantly – stay ahead of competition.”

Anders Sundsrud, Head of SEO & CRO, Stormberg

Avensia’s advisors are familiar with and advocates of the Contentsquare platform, allowing them to support customers far beyond initial implementation, training and configuration. Many businesses lack the time and internal resources to monitor data, analyze patterns and take appropriate action on a daily basis. Here, Avensia can provide services to proactively recommend optimization tactics based on data insights from the Contentsquare tool. 

“We are excited about partnering with Avensia and to work together with their amazingly skilled team who can help customers to harvest the full value of Contentsquare. We look forward to empowering brands in the retail industry and beyond with actionable behavioral data to help them deliver better online experiences, improve customer happiness and accelerate their growth.”

– Ossi Savolainen, Regional Vice President, Sweden, Contentsquare

About Avensia

At Avensia, we are experts in modern commerce. Our talented team provides businesses with tailored strategies and the most relevant technology for e-commerce, omnichannel, customer experience, and information management.

By combining solid technical know-how and strategical expertise with insights into the latest trends Avensia helps B2C and B2B customers across Europe, North America, and APAC to accelerate growth each day for long-term success. We continuously challenge ourselves and our customers to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Together, we create the winners in modern commerce.

Avensia’s global team includes more than 350 modern commerce experts based in Sweden (HQ), Norway, United Kingdom, United States and Philippines. Avensia is listed on the Nasdaq First North Premier Growth Market under the name AVEN. Learn more at avensia.com.

About Contentsquare

Contentsquare is a leading digital experience analytics platform that empowers businesses to understand and optimize the user experience across web, mobile, and app platforms. Its AI-powered platform provides rich and contextual insight into customer behaviors, feelings and intent — at every touchpoint in their journey — enabling businesses to build empathy and create lasting impact. 

More than 1300 leading brands use Contentsquare to grow their business, deliver more customer happiness and move with greater agility in a constantly changing world. Its insights are used to optimize the experience on over 1.3 million websites worldwide. For more information, visit http://www.contentsquare.com 

Media Contact:

Erica Ashner

Erica.Ashner@Contentsquare.com

The post Avensia Extends Offering to Help Commerce Businesses Make Smarter Decisions in Ever-Changing Market Conditions appeared first on Contentsquare.

This article will guide you through what you can do before, during and after the season. Let’s go for it!

Preparing for eCommerce peak season: get your site ready for the ride

In the dynamic realm of e-commerce, preparation is the key to thriving during peak shopping seasons like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas. Digital leaders know that thorough advance planning is essential for not only surviving but excelling during these periods of heightened online activity. How can we make sure that our site is ready for the peak season?

Step 1: Make sure that your website is optimized for the best customer experience

The initial and pivotal step entails a comprehensive evaluation and optimization of your existing digital channels well in advance of the peak season frenzy. By drawing insights from prior experiences and harnessing data from your Digital Experience Analytics platform, you can make informed decisions regarding the refinement of your online presence. 

Data-supported insights guide adjustments to layouts and the positioning of content, ensuring that your digital storefront is finely tuned to maximize customer engagement. 

• Understand how you compare to industry peers and how seasonality works by accessing industry benchmark data (see CS Benchmarks)
• Optimize product performance by accessing real time insights of your eCommerce (see CS Retail Media)
• Deliver the best customer experience thanks to a 360º customer understanding (see our platform)

Take all those insights and prepare your site for the peak season accordingly. 

Step 2: Follow the user journey, from campaigns to conversion

Not everything happens purely in-site. Probably you are running some advertising campaigns, maybe even several at the same time, each driving traffic to your site and consuming your budget. It wouldn’t be wise to lose sight of how all that inbound traffic behaves on your site.

Establishing seamless connections across your digital ecosystem is imperative. If you are getting ready to perform at your best, you won’t have time to consolidate data/information across different platforms. 

For that, make sure you integrate your Google or Adobe Analytics campaigns with your Digital Experience Analytics platform to create a comprehensive monitoring framework. This integration equips you with the ability to track and comprehend the performance of your marketing campaigns, thereby enabling the development of a digital experience that optimally directs traffic and enhances conversion rates.

Beyond marketing campaigns, as a general rule, integrate as much customer information as you can. VoC, APM solutions, Web Analytics, A/B Testing… all of them could work together and enhance and supercharge your marketing tech stack.

This is crucial not only for your ability to respond in the short-term, but also for future analysis and to lead you to better and more efficient campaigns. 

Step 3: Embrace Real-Time analysis and automation

During peak seasons, data flows incessantly. Relying solely on manual responses is insufficient. Automation becomes your ally in efficiently managing the inundation of information. Implement integrations that automate routine tasks and decisions will enable seamless operation when the crucial moment arrives.

The capacity to analyze data in real time is equally indispensable. Leveraging machine learning and AI-driven insights empowers you to make instantaneous, data-supported decisions. This enables the identification of trends, prediction of customer behavior, and proactive responses. Such real-time adaptability can determine whether you capitalize on surges in demand or miss out on valuable opportunities.

How can you do this? At Contentsquare we approach this scenario providing real-time capabilities throughout our platform:

• Advanced AI that helps you understand customer experience in real-time. Metrics such as Frustration Score can make sense of diverse information (Rage clicks, load times, hesitation, …) to understand when customers are struggling in real time.  
• Real-time alerts and dashboards, to keep control on your most important KPIs and triggering alerts that let you know about the urgent issues to solve
• Reporting and communication tools. Get the right alert to the right team using the right channels. Whether it is a Jira Ticket or a Slack message

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Navigating Peak Season Challenges: what to do during the holiday season

As the peak shopping season unfolds, the moment of truth arrives for digital leaders and their teams. It’s a time where every action counts, where real-time understanding and fast reactions are key. The consequences of any delay can be steep, with missed opportunities and potential revenue losses looming on the horizon. What to do when you have to perform at your best?

Prioritize Customer Experience above all

Set the right north star for your team. Peak season is the time to put customer experience front and center. Your response plan should revolve around ensuring that every customer enjoys a smooth journey. For instance, while Application Performance Monitoring (APM) solutions may highlight various issues, it’s crucial to prioritize those that have the most significant impact on customer experience and conversion rates. 

Your response plan should align with the North Star of delighting customers.

Context Matters: Enhancing Operational Efficiency

In the heat of peak season, providing context to every support issue is non-negotiable. Context not only expedites troubleshooting but also enhances operational efficiency. The ability to pinpoint the root cause of an issue swiftly can mean the difference between a minor hiccup and a major disruption.

Now it’s the time when all your integration efforts pay off. 

If your team needs to solve several backend problems, wouldn’t it be ideal if they could prioritize based on what is preventing customers from converting? Which errors are impeding customers to go further? Having that information integrated with your APM events gives you priceless speed to resolution. 

When a customer escalates a problem to customer service, what if the agent could have access to a Session Replay that shows exactly what the customer experienced? That would save a lot of time and frustration in solving the problem. 

10 lessons learned from past peak seasons with Clarins 

The AI Advantage: Streamlining Complex Challenges

Utilize real-time dashboards to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) that track customer experience and essential metrics related to business and technical performance. 

AI-driven insights play a pivotal role in simplifying the interpretation of vast data volumes in real time. They offer the capability to monitor and receive alerts promptly. This capability can be a game-changer, allowing rapid responses to minimize customer disruptions when issues arise and identifying opportunities for improvement. In essence, these dashboards and AI insights serve as your eyes and ears in the digital landscape, empowering you to act swiftly and enhance customer satisfaction while optimizing your operations.

Not only can you reduce your customer’s pain when something goes wrong but also to detect opportunities to even do better. 

Learning from the  experience: the 2024 peak season will be here before we know it will be here before we know it

Once the peak season ends, it’s essential to conduct a thorough post-mortem analysis and gain valuable insights from the experience. The goal isn’t to achieve a flawless peak season – that’s an elusive target. Customer preferences, evolving trends, and social dynamics ensure that each peak season is unique. 

As a digital leader, your primary aspiration should be to embrace agile learning from these trends, react swiftly, and consistently deliver the best customer experience. Data holds the key to navigating the evolving landscape of peak seasons. It’s not just about mining vast amounts of data; it’s about using data to gain foresight into the shape of your next peak season. Data-informed decisions are your compass. And customer experience should be your north star. 

After all, you crafted that digital experience with your customers in mind, didn’t you?

• Merely having a high-performance e-commerce platform is insufficient if your customers can’t find what they want and can’t do what they want.
• Collecting demographic data about your traffic is valuable, but it’s crucial to connect this information to customer behaviors that have the most significant impact on your business (all the nuances that make traffic convert into sales).
• Paying attention to those who silently exit without complaints is equally essential. Direct customer feedback is invaluable, but you also need to delve deeper into their behavior—the digital equivalent of non-verbal communication. 

Digital Experience Analytics provides the ideal framework for understanding your customer experience comprehensively. It encompasses critical aspects such as site performance, product placement, and the customer journeys that yield the highest conversions. Not only that, it helps you orchestrate all your ecommerce performance data (APMs, VoCs, Traffic Analytics, etc) and make sense of your customer experience as the north star. With this robust toolset, you can dissect and understand your customers’ digital journey and ensure that every aspect of your digital presence aligns seamlessly with their needs and expectations.

How can Contentsquare help you during your peak seasons?

Contentsquare provides you the leading Digital Experience Analytics platform that help retailers excel in customer experience and keep your peak seasons under control:

• Best-in-class. Compare your performance against industry peers, so you can stand out 
• Customer centricity. Understand your customer behavior in an impact-first approach, both in your web and app
• Fast response. Access real-time information and alerts
• Excellent performance. Excel in your digital experience performance by leveraging on a first class Digital Experience Monitoring platform 

Ready for more? Ask for a demo. 

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Get to grips with Contentsquare fundamentals with this 6 minute product tour.

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The post Ecommerce peak season: How to Optimize Your Website for a Smooth Shopping Experience appeared first on Contentsquare.

For starters, it helps explain the -3.5% Year-on-Year drop in eCommerce conversion rates that we saw last year—and the accompanying dip in session consumption metrics such as time spent per session.

We lay out exactly how much these metrics dropped across seven retail sub-industries in 2022 in our recent 2023 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark report, which we link to below. (You can also read a summary of the report’s key findings.)

To accompany the report’s release, we’re lending retailers a hand in addressing its diagnosis of conversion rate decline by publishing a series of articles on eCommerce conversion rate optimization. (This in-depth, albeit more general, article on conversion rate optimization should also help.)

In this article, we draw on findings from the benchmark report to investigate why the eCommerce conversion funnel is changing—and why this change demands a new approach to conversion rate optimization for retailers. 

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report for the metrics that really matter.

Get my free copy

What is the eCommerce conversion funnel?

Marketers use funnels to represent the customer journey from ‘top of the funnel’ (TOFU) awareness through ‘middle of the funnel’ (MOFU) consideration to ‘bottom of the funnel’ (BOFU) conversion. The object is to get as many customers from the top to the bottom of the funnel. 

A narrowing funnel shape is appropriate because while awareness casts a wide net and (ideally) brings in a big audience, only a minority of those who become aware of a brand will end up buying something from it, and there’s a steady drop-off along the way. 

Traditionally, the on-site eCommerce funnel has been mapped out like this:

• Top of the funnel (TOFU): Awareness = Homepage
• Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Consideration = Category/Search/Product pages
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Intent/Purchase = Checkout

With this model in mind, retailers have spent much time curating stories and working on TOFU (homepage-based) content to raise brand awareness, attracting new customers who can be nurtured further down the funnel towards conversion and retention.

But things have changed. For an increasing proportion of visitors to eCommerce websites, the homepage is no longer the first port of call—and they’re entirely bypassing the traditional TOFU.

So why is this happening?

eCommerce conversion funnel: the differents stages

In the world of eCommerce, the conversion funnel is a critical component for businesses looking to increase their sales and revenue. It is a marketing concept that describes the journey a customer takes from the initial introduction to a product or service to the final purchase. Understanding the different stages of the conversion funnel is essential for eCommerce businesses to optimize their sales funnel and convert more visitors into customers.

The eCommerce conversion funnel consists of four main stages:

1. Awareness: This is the top of the funnel where potential customers first become aware of a product or service. It includes various marketing channels, such as social media, search engines, and email marketing.
2. Interest: At this stage, customers explore and research products and services to learn more about their features, benefits, and pricing. This stage includes product pages and category pages on the eCommerce website.
3. Decision: In this stage, customers make a decision to buy a product or service. This stage includes the shopping cart and checkout process on the website.
4. Action: At the bottom of the funnel, customers complete the transaction and become paying customers.

By analyzing each stage of the eCommerce conversion funnel, businesses can identify areas where they can optimize their marketing efforts or improve the user experience on their website. This can help improve conversion rates and generate more revenue for the business.

ECommerce conversion funnel depending on industries

Why ecommerce conversion funnel can change depending on industry? Cause each industry is different and has different needs and goals. For example, an ecommerce store selling fashion may want to focus on getting users to view a product page and add items to their cart, while an ecommerce store selling electronics may want to encourage users to read product reviews before making a purchase. Different industries require different approaches, and the conversion funnel should be tailored to the industry in order to maximize conversions.

1. Retail ECommerce Funnel:

• Awareness: Potential customers become aware of the product/brand through online ads, word-of-mouth, and social media.
• Interest: Interested customers research the product/brand by reading reviews and visiting the website.
• Desire: Potential customers browse the website to learn more about the product/brand and compare with competitors.
• Action: Customers make a purchase decision and add items to their shopping cart.
• Conversion: Customers complete the purchase and become paying customers.

2. Travel ECommerce Funnel:

• Awareness: Potential customers become aware of the travel destination through online ads, word-of-mouth, and social media.
• Interest: Interested customers research the destination by reading reviews and visiting the website.

The traffic trends transforming the eCommerce conversion funnel

Data from the 2023 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark report shows that visitors to eCommerce sites last year (on both desktop and mobile) spent most of their session time on traditionally middle-of-funnel ‘consideration’ heavy product and category pages—and hardly any time at all on the top-of-funnel homepage.

Share of session time spent by page, by device

And this makes perfect sense when you consider where customers are coming from and the devices they’re using. 

Firstly, customers are increasingly alighting on eCommerce sites via paid search and social campaigns (not to mention influencer marketing). These campaigns often take visitors directly onto product description pages.

Traffic share by source, by industry

Secondly, it’s also crucial to remember that retail is the most mobile-led of industries. Last year, mobile drove nearly 3 in 4 (73.5%) visits to eCommerce sites. Of these visits, 55% were from new visitors (compared to 49% new visitors on desktop). 

And mobile visits are fleeting. Our research shows that visitors using mobile spend an average of only 2.6 minutes on eCommerce websites—under half the time (5.7 minutes) that desktop users spend. (What’s more, this time has dropped from 2.9 minutes in 2021.)

Time spent per session, by device, by industry, year-over-year

For a growing segment of eCommerce site visitors, the top of the eCommerce conversion funnel is (depending on how you look at it) being skipped entirely or is ‘sinking’ below the traditional top-of-funnel level. 

The new eCommerce conversion funnel looks more like this:

• Top/Middle of the funnel (TOFU/MOFU): Awareness and Consideration = Category/Search/Product pages
• Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Intent/Purchase = Checkout/Purchase

What does the evolution of the eCommerce conversion funnel mean for retailers? 

The erosion of the traditional top of the eCommerce conversion funnel—and of time spent per session—has big implications for retailers looking to convert visitors into (ideally returning) customers.

Here are three things we suggest you do to adapt:

1. Bring your story deeper down the eCommerce conversion funnel

“Instead of spending the majority of your time and effort thinking around what we want to do higher up in the funnel, we should be thinking around, okay, what do we need to get across at PDP level from a story? How do we tell the story deeper in the funnel? Because that’s clearly where customers are migrating to?”

–Tom Parker, Site Optimization Manager, Marks and Spencer

Brand stories are extremely important. A brand story differentiates your business in the eyes of consumers. It helps build loyalty and lifetime value—vital when considering the hefty expense of relying on paid and new traffic.

When visitors come to your eCommerce brand through the top of the funnel, you have ample opportunities to tell them your brand story, showcase your identity and progressively nurture the sort of relationship with them that will keep them coming back in future.

However, with an increasing chunk of visitors (particularly new-to-you visitors) now coming in via paid campaigns and straight on product pages, you can no longer assume they’ll be exposed to that top-funnel story—or at least, not on the pages where TOFU content traditionally sits.

And given the decreasing time spent per session, particularly on mobile, they’re not necessarily going to have (or want to spend the) time to familiarize themselves with your non-product pages.

That’s why you need to think about working your brand story into the pages visitors are arriving on first: category and product pages.

A product page now needs to sell more than the product itself—it needs to sell your brand, too. Category, search and even checkout pages also need to pull more weight. 

2. Segment your audience to personalize every experience

With a myriad of traffic sources now bringing visitors to eCommerce sites, segmenting your audience is more important than ever. 

You need to segment when analyzing customer behavior to understand what each segment is motivated by. Then you need to be mindful of that motivation when tailoring your experience to serve each visitor a personalized experience, based on the segment they belong to, that takes them exactly where they want to go, as fast as possible. 

And this awareness needs to extend to the device they’re using to interact with your experience. Desktop users may have more appetite for delving into your product range, or consuming in-depth content that familiarizes them with your brand. 

Mobile users, by contrast, will probably be less inclined to browse around your website and delve deep into content, especially if they’ve arrived via a paid ad campaign that highlights a particular product. For them, efficiency will be paramount.

Data from the 2023 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark report shows that a buying session tends to be a lot deeper than a normal session. Across all retail, the average page views per buying session is 25.4 pages, compared to the overall average session depth of 5 pages.

This insight highlights the need to continue optimizing product pages—including out-of-stock product pages—and encourage users to view more product pages with ‘You may also like’, ‘Wear it with’, ‘Bestsellers’ carousels. 

However, when it comes to certain consumer segments, a low session depth doesn’t necessarily indicate a failure to convert—far from it. In fact, the evolution of the eCommerce conversion funnel suggests that many customers want to get deeper into the journey faster—and get to the checkout as fast as possible.

3. Forget the funnel: Optimize your experience from end to end

“Every detail matters. When you go through your site page by page, write down anything that bothers you. When you test these small things and take a data-driven approach to optimization, you’ll find a lot of savings in the details. It’s all about making a frictionless purchase experience for your customers.” 

—David Ting, CTO, Zenni Optical

When optimizing your customer journeys, prioritization must go to the pages customers are engaging with most frequently: Category, Product and Search. 

But with entry points to your sites now being so varied and unpredictable, it’s absolutely imperative that you have a clear understanding of what’s going on at every stage of the customer journey.

The fact is that wherever in the funnel your visitors are when they’re on your website, they’ll be frustrated by friction and engaged by User Experience design that encourages them to interact. To that extent, at least, the on-site conversion funnel matters less than the overall experience. 

And what you should be aiming for with that experience is to remove friction (such as, but not limited to, slow loading pages) and increase engagement (and user activity) throughout. 

For the full details on what’s causing friction in eCommerce experiences—and about the value of promoting user activity, you should check out the report.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report for the metrics that really matter.

Get my free copy

Only by having (properly segmented) insight into how customers are behaving on every page on your website—and why they’re behaving as they are—can you ensure that your experience is truly optimized for conversion from end to end.

And only an AI-powered Digital Experience Analytics (DXA) solution like Contentsquare’s Digital Experience Analytics Cloud will give you that insight.

(It will certainly save you from trawling through your website and writing everything down as David Ting suggests above, though you should still keep your notepad handy!)

Optimize for the eCommerce conversion funnel with Contentsquare

Unlike traditional analytics solutions, our DXA platform doesn’t stop at showing you how many visitors are arriving on your website, clicking on stuff and bouncing, exiting or converting.

It also shows you what’s going on between clicks (via Zone-Based Heatmaps) , how customers are progressing through your site (via Customer Journey Analysis) and what the root causes of customer behavior (via Session Replay).

Plus, platform features like CS Insights leverage machine learning to bring high priority client-side issues (such as technical errors) to your attention before they lose you customers

To learn more about how leading eCommerce have used Contentsquare to optimize their experiences, check out our article on eCommerce conversion rate optimization strategies.

Or why not see for yourself what Contentsquare can do for your website and your eCommerce conversion funnel with a quick product tour? 

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The post The eCommerce conversion funnel is changing: Here’s 3 strategies to help you adapt appeared first on Contentsquare.

This year, Contentsquare invited our strategic partners onsite to stop by the Contentsquare booth for on-site product demos and discussions on the power of leveraging your martech stack integrations to the full extent.

Martech stack integrations for better customer experience

At Contentsquare, we understand how important it is for retailers to leverage best-in-class martech stack integrations to create seamless and personalized customer experiences (CX).

Retailers that invest in building their unique tech stack, rather than investing in a one-size-fits-all product suite, can grow with their technology, matching key objectives with the tools they’ve invested in. High ROI is the north star for business leadership, and investing in a stack rather than a suite prevents the underutilization of expensive products.

During our two-day Techstack Showcase, Contentsquare was joined by eight forward-thinking independent software vendor (ISV) partners who, combined with Contentsquare, maximize ROI and improve digital experiences.

Partners at the Techstack Showcase

AB Tasty, Optimizely, Dynamic Yield and Monetate were the experimentation partners who spoke alongside our team on the importance of testing and personalization. Integrations across these tools allow retailer teams to uncover the why behind their campaign results and build more robust follow-up experiments.

“Speaking at the Contentsquare booth was a really great opportunity to showcase how AB Tasty works together with Contentsquare. We’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with the Contentsquare team across many retail clients globally. This was a great opportunity to keep telling that story.” —Ashley Thorpe, Team Lead – Enterprise Customer Success, AB Tasty

Bloomreach joined us during the Techstack Showcase on Monday. This partnership adds unique insights from Contentsquare to customer profiles in Bloomreach, allowing brands to trigger more personalized actions. This is vital for retailers looking for deeper analysis of their customer experience and uncovering the impact marketing campaigns have on on-site metrics.

On Tuesday, we were joined by Botify, who, together with Contentsquare, helps retailers connect the dots along the customer journey, understanding the pages causing frustration or friction and their SEO indexability. By uncovering the CX nuances, retailers can optimize their digital experiences to drive more people to their site, offer a more personalized journey, and lead more users to conversion.

Ingenuity also joined us at the booth. They help retailers build, launch and optimize digital commerce brands that connect and resonate with modern consumers.

Bazaarvoice was one of our most popular demos, with a crowd of people stopping by the booth to understand the correlation between User Generated Content and data insights. Brands and retailers who can understand the impact that user-generated content is having on their engagement metrics and conversion rates, can make better decisions for the business and CX.

“The goal for both brands and retailers is to increase conversions and the only way to do that is to serve the optimal content and personalized experience to your customers. Being able to tell the story of how Contentsquare and Bazaarvoice work together was really powerful!” —Bhavik Gandecha, Team Lead, Solution Consulting, Bazaarvoice

Contentsquare’s Experience Partner Ecosystem

We were honored to have so many fantastic partners join us at Shoptalk and look forward to expanding the program in the coming year. We understand that identifying the ins and outs of the customer experience is essential for retailers—and efficient and seamless martech stack integrations are key to revealing in-depth consumer behavior into actionable insights.

Our commitment to you, our retailer customers, is to continue to invest in product updates and a partner ecosystem that drives growth and success for your teams. Contentsquare’s Experience Partner Ecosystem today includes +125 martech stack integrations that enable retailers to understand and optimize the digital customer experience they offer.

Learn more about Contentsquare’s Partner Ecosystem here.

The post Contentsquare’s Techstack Showcase: How to Build a Best-in-Class Technology Stack for Retailers appeared first on Contentsquare.

We’ve seen the three eCommerce conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies featured in this article work wonders for the conversion rates of leading retailers (we’ve provided links to their stories throughout).

Combined with the general tips for conversion rate optimization and guide to becoming a strategic CRO specialist we provide elsewhere on our website, these CRO strategies will help you grow from strength to strength in 2023.

And this despite the troubling signs of an eCommerce decline found in our 2023 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark report.

For this year’s report, we’ve analyzed 20 billion user sessions from 1,493 retail sites, operating across seven retail sub-industries and in 26 countries to bring you a truly comprehensive picture of the state of digital customer experiences in retail last year.

The strategies in this article are all informed by that analysis. You can find more insights and strategies for digital customer experience success inside.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report for the metrics that really matter.

Get my free copy

1. Fix user frustration (it’s killing your conversions)

The first step to ensuring eCommerce conversion rate optimization is to minimize bounces. Bounce rates rose in retail last year, increasing from 46% in 2021 to 47% in 2022. Fashion had the lowest (‘only’ 44%), while Consumer Electronics had the dubious honor of achieving the highest with a bounce rate of 57%. All sub verticals, however, saw an increase.

Our report also reveals that bounces were highest on product pages (with checkout and cart not far behind): 59%. That’s unfortunate, because product pages were also the most popular pages, with 68% of shoppers reaching them.

So what can retailers do to stop site visitors bouncing? Priority number one should be to scour their customer journeys to find and eliminate friction.

User frustration impacted over one in three (37%) retail sessions last year, and frustration factors are doing serious damage to eCommerce conversion rates.

Sites that fell prey to slow page loads (2022’s leading frustration factor), for example, had a 3.9% higher bounce rate than fast loading sites.

Delivering friction-free user journeys is about identifying precisely where in your journeys users are getting frustrated (which isn’t always easy), and understanding exactly what’s causing users to feel frustrated (which isn’t always obvious).

To understand both the ‘where’ and ‘why’ of user frustration, you need a digital experience analytics (DXA) solution. A solution like ours: Contentsquare’s Digital Analytics Cloud.

Our platform will not only enable you to track and measure every stage of the customer journey, leveraging AI to alert you to the presence of points of friction (and delight), but also empower you to dig behind the metrics and understand why visitors are behaving as they are.

Clarks’ CRO strategy: removing a friction point from product pages

Using Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Analysis tool, the digital team at shoe retailer Clarks noticed a significant drop off in visitors adding products to baskets via its product details page. Deciding to investigate further, they applied Zone-based Heatmaps to the product detail pages.

Almost immediately, they noticed that (see screenshot below) more visitors were interacting with Size and Add to Cart buttons than with the Width selector feature. And this was a big problem, given that selecting width is a required step to take to get to checkout.

Based on this insight, Clarks decided to try pre-selecting widths for items when only one width-fit was available, thereby removing unnecessary friction from the shopping journey.

This increased the Add to Cart rate, driving $1.1million in annual revenue.

Harrods’ CRO strategy: creating a friction-free checkout process

Any technical or user experience (UX) related issues on your checkout page need to be detected and dealt with fast. After all, you don’t want to fall at the last hurdle—and a surprising number of businesses do exactly that.

Reducing friction at the checkout page can pay big dividends when it comes to conversion rates. Just ask the digital team at luxury department store Harrods.  They used Contentsquare to uncover and resolve numerous issues affecting their site’s check-out process.

As a result of these fixes, Harrods saw an 8% decline in cart abandonment and an increase in conversions.

2. Encourage user activity to lift conversions

Securing conversions isn’t just about removing friction from the path of site users. It’s also about persuading them to move further down that path.

Retailers therefore need to ensure their customer journeys aren’t just friction-free, but also highly engaging. Thanks to our 2023 Retail Benchmark report, you can now put a number on just how valuable user engagement is. The key is user activity, or ‘activity’ for short.

We measured activity on sites by dividing the sum amount of clicks, swipes, scrolls and typing users perform during a session by the amount of time their sessions last. We found that sites with the lowest level of user activity have an average bounce rate of 55.9% and a conversion rate of 1.98%. Sites with the highest level of user activity, by contrast, have much lower bounce rates (43.3%) and significantly higher conversion rates (2.79%).

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report for the metrics that really matter.

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Encouraging activity is essential to achieving eCommerce conversion rate optimization.

Retailers need to seek out opportunities to stimulate on-page activity. This is about being savvy about your UX design and copywriting. (On that note, here’s 5 tips to optimize your Calls to Action. But it’s also about detecting points in your user journeys where activity is minimal, and finding ways to stimulate activity, and—by extension—conversion. (And finding points where activity is high to capitalize upon them.)

Lovehoney’s CRO strategy: encouraging interaction to boost conversion

Increasing user activity can often be as simple as ensuring the elements users can interact with are accessible—and visible. Spotting these elements for yourself can be a little trickier—but DXA solutions can help.

When Lovehoney’s digital team wanted to assess the early performance of two Black Friday landing pages, they used Contentsquare’s Customer Journey Analysis tool to do it.

They found that less than 24% of users were getting from the landing page to a product description page—and 12.5% exiting the site directly.

Further investigation revealed that users who were filtering results were more likely to convert, but click rate on the sort and filter buttons was low. Lovehoney’s team responded by moving the three main categories out of the filter dropdown so users could click on these right away.

This resulted in more interaction (a measure of activity) on those filters, a 17% reduction in bounce rate and a staggering 30% increase in on-page conversions.

3. Make the most of mobile traffic (and don’t forget desktop)

When it comes to traffic share, desktop is unquestionably losing out to mobile. Almost 3 in 4 (73.5%) visits to retail websites last year took place on mobile. Conversion, however, is a different story.

Our data shows us that in 2022, desktop achieved a significantly higher conversion rate (3.8% paid, 3.5% unpaid) than mobile (1.6% paid, 2.2% unpaid)—and, despite dominating traffic share, mobile captured only 54% of revenue for retailers.

Clearly, desktop still matters, particularly in sub-industries (such as Consumer Electronics, Grocery and Home Goods and Furnishing) where it continues to capture the majority of revenue. Retailers should, therefore, be wary of fixating entirely on mobile, and should seek to connect mobile and desktop experiences wherever possible.

That said, the increasing abundance of mobile traffic coming retailers’ way represents an as-yet largely untapped opportunity to drive more conversion. Retailers need to optimize their mobile experiences for conversion wherever possible—and again, DXA solutions can come in handy here.

De Beers’ CRO strategy: optimizing the mobile experience

In 2018, De Beers was set to launch a new website—and one of the digital team’s top priorities was to improve mobile conversion.

Zone-based Heatmaps showed them an unusual exposure rate on the product detail pages (PDPs) seen by mobile visitors. Despite an Add to Bag CTA sitting at the top of the PDPs, a large percentage were scrolling all the way to the bottom.

The team hypothesized that users were simply not seeing the button—it being easier to miss when scrolling on mobile. They decided to test to see what a sticky CTA on the PDPs would do to conversion rates.

What it did was lift those conversion rates—by a remarkable 10%.

Test your way to eCommerce conversion rate optimization

Hopefully, this article has given you plenty of ideas for making conversion-fuelling adjustments to your eCommerce experience.

Ultimately, however, while these strategic principles will help guide you in the right direction, you should be looking to test and experiment on your site as much as possible to find the strategies that work specifically for your business.

The behavioral data provided by a DXA solution like ours can take your testing and optimization efforts to the next level—and fashion retailer New Look can attest to this.

They used Contentsquare to monitor advanced behavioral metrics (such as click rate and conversion rate of specific elements on their site) when testing out placing user generated content on their product pages.

The results were spectacular, with New Look ultimately increasing their overall product conversion by an astounding 19%. Learn more in our New Look case study.

Check out our product demo today to get an idea of how Contentsquare could help you convert more customers than ever before this year.

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The post 3 eCommerce conversion rate optimization strategies to grow your retail business this year appeared first on Contentsquare.

However, this shift also comes with new and unique challenges.

Digital advertising costs have surged and consumer attention is becoming increasingly fragmented, leaving retailers grappling with fewer page views and rising visitor frustration.

Add echoes of recession to that list and one thing becomes clear as day: Retailers need to adapt to this new reality—and do it fast.

Here’s the good news: With the right insights, your digital team can strategize to make your customer experience a consistent growth engine for your business this year—driving more conversions and a better eCommerce ROI.

And we know just where you can find those insights: In the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report for the metrics that really matter.

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(If you’re after some general practical guidance on optimizing for conversions, don’t forget to bookmark our guide to Conversion Rate Optimization).

Keep reading to find out more about what’s inside the report and what you’ll get out of it, plus a preview of five key insights that our analysis has revealed.

The Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report: What’s in it and why it matters

In putting together this year’s retail benchmark report, we’ve analyzed 2023’s digital customer experience data, from over 25 billion site visits that happened across 1,673 retail sites, 23 countries and 10 retail verticals:

• Luxury
• Health & Beauty
• Consumer Electronics
• Fashion
• Home Goods & Furnishings
• Grocery
• Specialty Retail
• Appliances & Household Goods
• Department & Big Box
• Outdoors & Sporting Goods

Our findings will enable you to benchmark your business’s performance against your competitors. We’ve rendered them in snazzy graph and chart form, making them super accessible for you and your colleagues, and easily shareable with your execs.

We’ve also packed the report full to bursting with insights, strategies, best practices and predictions that should help you delight customers, beat the benchmark for 2024 and grow your business in spite of continuing economic pressures.

According to a recent Deloitte survey, almost a third (30%) of retail companies see ‘managing inflationary pressure and reducing costs’ as their number one priority for 2024. Despite signs that inflation is in retreat, consumers are still struggling and consumer uncertainty is high.

While technology is seen by Deloitte (and many retail executives) as a means of generating cost-saving efficiencies, the pressure to cut costs could imperil potentially vital technology investments and damage the digital customer experience when it most needs strengthening.

The 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report contains the data and insights you need to make growth-generating strategic decisions about your digital customer experience with real confidence, and to instill that same confidence in the decision-makers holding the purse strings.

Now here’s a taster of what you’ll get from reading it: five insights into the digital customer experience landscape in retail in 2023 that will point you in the direction of conversions, revenue and growth in 2024.

1. Retail conversion rates dropped in 2023—and bounces rose

To be more precise, conversion rates dropped -5.8% in 2023 from the previous year, falling to 2.59% in Q4 2023. Meanwhile, bounce rates were up by +1.3% year-on-year, up to an eye-wateringly high 46.4%.

These metrics by themselves don’t tell us much—except that retailers should be concerned.

There’s more context on conversion to be found in our report, where we look at related metrics (such as average order value and revenue per visit) and the surprising reason why overall bounce increased, even though desktop bounce rates actually improved in 2023.

To understand why conversion rates are dropping and bounce rates are rising, and to move the needle in the right direction on those all-important outcomes, retailers need to understand the full customer journey.

That’s what the 2024 Retail Digital Customer Experience Benchmark is designed to help with. And it starts with understanding where visitors are coming from. Literally.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report for the metrics that really matter.

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2. Mobile traffic dominated, hurting conversion

The year’s biggest story: Retail traffic fell -5.0%, with 57% of sites seeing less traffic in 2023 than in the previous year.

We delve into which sources this diminished traffic came from and the types of visitors brought in with it in our report, but here we’ll focus on a big factor in bringing conversion rates down: The continuing growth of mobile traffic.

Nearly 3 out of 4 (77%) visits to retail sites in 2023 came via mobile, and this device type drove more than half (56.3%) of the total revenue for retail sites in 2023—up 3 percentage points from 2022.

However, despite driving less than 1/4th of all traffic, desktop delivered nearly twice that amount in revenue. That’s because conversion is lower on mobile than desktop, at only 2.20% compared to desktop’s 3.89%.

These statistics show that eCommerce leaders urgently need to invest in optimizing mobile experiences to stimulate conversion rates.

They should also ensure that desktop and mobile experiences are seamlessly integrated, making it easy for shoppers who still prefer desktop over mobile for making purchases to complete on desktop what they’ve started on mobile.

3. Falling consumption dragged conversion down

Another crucial factor behind falling conversion rates was an across the board decline in content consumption metrics. Session depth fell another -2.3%. Scroll rate declined from 47.8% to 46.9%. And time spent on websites fell by -3.4%.

The average page views per buying session (that is, a session that ended in a purchase) in 2023 stretched beyond 20 pages, showing that the more pages and content site visitors consume the more likely they are to convert.

And when you compare that to the average page views per session in 2023 (6.1 on desktop and 4.8 on mobile), it’s easy to see that the decline of content consumption is having a huge impact on conversion rates.

Our report offers various insights into tackling the growing consumption crisis, including highlighting the device type each vertical should prioritize for optimization.

But even before reading our report, the next two insights will help point you in the right direction to start raising your consumption and conversion rates.

4. User frustration is rife—and damaging retail conversion rates

First up, you need to know your biggest enemy: User frustration, which our report reveals affects 40% of shopper experiences. This frustration is caused by many factors, including website errors and user experience design flaws, with JavaScript errors being this year’s most common (and damaging) cause, impacting 19.1% of sessions

With two out of every five visits impacted by frustration, these factors directly impact retail conversion rates and cost retailers $0.56 per visit in wasted spend.

Google is now endorsing (and demanding) the elimination of frustration from the experience. Their Core Web Vitals (CWVs) provide an objective set of performance standards for sites: perform poorly and you’re wasting precious visits.

There’s money to be recouped by fixing frustration. You can start by reading our report. We list the main CWSs where retailers are falling short and seeing far shallower session depths, a higher bounce rate, and limited engagement.

See how your digital experience stacks up.

Download the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report for the metrics that really matter.

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5. Returning visitors generate higher conversion rates and more revenue

In 2023, new traffic continued to make up the majority (52.1%) of visits to retail sites. (You’ll find the full breakdown of new vs. returning traffic share, by retail vertical, year-over-year, in our report.)

And if retailers want to improve their conversion rates in 2024, they might want to change that.

Because when customers come back, they don’t just browse—they buy, and in a big way. Our report reveals that sites with higher numbers of returning visitors enjoy a staggering +40% higher conversion rate.

Coupled with the fact that, unlike returning visitors, newcomers are more likely to come from paid channels, it means that those repeat engagements aren’t just valuable—they’re also cheaper to attract and convert 4x better than new visitors.

This strategic revelation is key for any retailer looking to maximize value and efficiency in one fell swoop. Tap into owned marketing—like email and SMS—to attract more returning traffic and boost revenue.

So if you want a mantra for driving conversions and growth in 2024 through your digital customer experience, here it is: “Engage, convert, retain—and repeat!”

Boost retail conversion rates with digital experience analytics

We’ve just scratched the surface of the insights on offer in the 2024 Retail Digital Experience Benchmark Report. Here we’ve had room to give you a quick oversight of the lay of the land in retail in 2023—and of what you need to work on in 2024 to see healthy conversion rates and growth.

As for the ‘how’ of making these changes, you’ll need technology that enables you to explore and optimize every stage of the customer journey. That’s where digital experience analytics (DXA) comes into play.

DXA goes beyond traditional analytics by enabling you to dig into the full range of user behavior, recording and analyzing the entire customer journey, including both the clicks and the conversion-driving activity that happens between the clicks: scrolls, hovers, taps, etc.

We’ve written elsewhere about how DXA enables you to optimize conversion rates—and we’ve seen countless of our retail clients use Contentsquare to do exactly that.

French luxury fashion house Kenzo, for example, saw a +150% increase in online conversion rate (a +25% increase from the previous year) within seven days of making changes to its eCommerce site suggested by Contentsquare.

If you’re thinking you might like to join the ranks of retailers who’ve used Contentsquare to supercharge conversions, why not check out a short product tour to see it in action?

You never know, it could be a conversion experience for you—and, ultimately, for your customers.

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The post Boost your retail conversion rates with these 5 insights from our Benchmark Report appeared first on Contentsquare.

To understand how consumer activity and behavior change during the holiday shopping season, Contentsquare analyzed over 2.6 billion sessions and 12.7 billion pageviews from eight countries from Oct. 1 to Nov. 28, 2022.

Throughout this piece, “normal” refers to regular, non-holiday activity tracked from Oct. 1 to Nov. 20, and “peak” refers to holiday shopping activity from Nov. 25 to Nov. 28—Black Friday/ Cyber Monday weekend.

The busiest day of the busiest season is Black Friday, where traffic increased by 34% and purchasing sessions by 85% from the previous day.

By comparing normal vs peak season activity, we can understand how consumer behavior and preferences have evolved since last year and what shopping trends retailers should expect in 2023.

Five customer experience holiday shopping trends from 2022

Shoppers prefer mobile for browsing and buying

Across retail, mobile made up 77% of all traffic during peak, a 4% increase year-over-year (YoY) and a 6% increase over normal traffic in 2022. Mobile also made up 65% of all buying sessions during peak, 5% more than normal. Shoppers didn’t just use mobile to browse; they regularly finished the buyer journey and completed the transaction on mobile.

The highest increase in mobile traffic and conversions was on Black Friday, with 35% more traffic and 27% more conversions than normal.

Conversion behavior varies based on retail sub-verticals

Holiday shopping behavior for retail and eCommerce brands can vary significantly based on the sub-vertical. For example, consumer electronics and technology products are known for big savings on Black Friday, whereas grocery doesn’t have that same expectation of discounts.

To get a better understanding of just how much it varies, Contentsquare analyzed six sub-verticals within the industry: Consumer Electronics, Fashion, Grocery, Health & Beauty, Home Goods & Furnishings and Luxury.

Out of all the sub-verticals analyzed, Health & Beauty had the highest increase in conversion behavior during peak. It had the highest desktop and mobile conversion rate increases from normal, with 124% and 105%, respectively. While Grocery had the smallest conversion increase, it was still an impressive 36% over normal.

Health & Beauty also had the highest rate of visitors making it to the cart page with 9%, while Grocery tied with Home Goods & Furnishings for the lowest rate of 3%.

Conversion rate by retail sub-vertical

Visitors continue to experience errors

Errors continue to create friction and hinder customer experiences during the holiday shopping season. Site errors can lead to more bounce and abandonment rates and fewer repeat customers. With the retail industry average bounce rate at 48%, brands need to do everything they can to reduce errors or friction when visitors arrive on the site.

During peak, 16% of all visitor sessions experienced errors, 21% higher than normal.

Conversion rates are higher than last year

With an unpredictable economy, many shoppers waited for the holiday shopping season to purchase gifts and large-ticket items to save money. Unlike the previous few years when people had stimulus checks and a lot more time to shop online, 2022 represented a different holiday shopping pattern which will likely continue in 2023.

Shoppers continued to convert at significantly higher rates during peak and outperformed the previous year. Conversions for retailers increased by 50% during peak in 2021 and continued to climb in 2022, with 78% in conversions over normal.

The normal conversion rate in 2021 across retailers was 2% and increased to 3% during peak, spiking 50%. In 2022, the normal conversion rate was 1.8% and increased to 3.2% during peak, a 78% increase.

Conversions during ‘normal’ vs ‘peak’

Decreases in average order value vary on sub-verticals

Black Friday offers deep discounts, which is why the average cart value is lower during peak than normal. However, the percentage decrease varies significantly based on the sub-vertical.

Luxury had the most significant decrease, with a 25% reduction in average order value. Fashion had the second-largest reduction, with an 11.3% decrease in cart value. Health & Beauty had the lowest reduction in average order value with just a 3% decrease.

Seven things you can do today to start preparing for peak shopping seasons

• Test early and often. Start testing new CTAs, product placements, hero banners, carousels and more to see what creates the most engagement and can be replicated during peak season.
• Display UGC. Share user-generated content (UGC) to build trust and increase click rate, engagement and conversions.
• Allow add-to-basket options on PLPs. Let customers hover over items and “add to basket” while still on a PLP to simplify the customer journey.
• Share product availability. Add messaging like “limited stock available” or “2 items left” to minimize frustration and create a sense of urgency.
• Provide social proof. Go beyond sharing reviews at the bottom of PDPs and highlight top reviews and ratings above the fold to increase demand.
• Make discounts simple, obvious and easy to add. Make it clear what discounts have been added or why their cart doesn’t qualify. Give discount code names that are easy to remember, like ‘BLACKFRIDAY’ instead of ‘BLKFRI2022.’
• Combine checkout fields. Fewer form fields reduce the risk of abandonment so aim for 8-10 fields maximum. Combine ‘First Name’ and ‘Last Name’ fields and include the option to select the default billing address as the shipping address too.

The post 5 Holiday shopping trends to know for 2023 appeared first on Contentsquare.

Brands need a deeper, more holistic understanding of their customers to provide the experiences they crave. The CX your brand offers can directly impact its growth, revenue and ROI in 2023.

Here are 10 eCommerce trends we’ll see in 2023:

1. Live-stream shopping experiences will take off

Live shopping is a part of social commerce that combines entertainment with real-time shopping. It’s not just more engaging; it also delivers results. Companies see up to 10X higher conversion rates with live shopping than in conventional eCommerce.

Today, over 35% of all live streamers are in the apparel and fashion category, but in the future, it’s likely to get widespread adoption across all industries.

Already in action

Kiehl’s, a skincare brand, ran an Instagram Live events campaign hosted by beauty content creators. During the events, Kiehl’s customers could learn about their products and make purchases directly via their Instagram Shop. The ​​seven-week campaign delivered an 8X return on ad spend.

2. Employees will be content creators

Posts shared by employees get 800% more engagement than those shared by corporate brand accounts.

As social media helps content creators grow their personal brand, it can also help corporate brands better connect with their audience by humanizing their messaging and products. Having a human share a message on social media helps cuts through the clutter of countless ads and promotions.

Solutions for eCommerce Teams

3. Building community-driven brands

Community building is all about engaging customers beyond just selling your products. It fosters customer loyalty, building long-lasting relationships with brands. The online communities market is projected to increase from its value of $7.3 billion to $27.6 billion by 2032—a compound annual growth rate of 14%.

“In the next five years it’ll not only be about customer journeys, but it’ll also be about life journeys.” —Gary Roth, Director of Business Value Engineering, Contentsquare

Already in action

The sports apparel company, Lululemon has led the way in building a loyal community around its brand. After acquiring Mirror, an in-home smart fitness mirror, they launched a loyalty and content memberships program. By combining the two products—apparel and fitness tech—they’re able to create more compelling experiences and cultivate positive change in the lives of their customers.

4. More holistic, personalized omnichannel experiences

Brands will continue to optimize their personalization strategies to create a holistic brand experience through every channel. Whether it is on social media, email, SMS or any other type of digital touchpoint, consumers want a seamless experience. Brands need to anticipate consumers’ unique needs and expectations, demonstrate empathy and deliver a personalized experience while remaining uncomplicated and enjoyable to use.

2024 Digital CX Trends

Discover ten trends and what you can do to prepare your business for 2024—and beyond.

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5. Testing will be embedded into eCommerce company culture

Today, experimentation and testing are usually owned by one department and used to increase conversion rates. However, it will soon be integrated and owned across all departments. It will become part of business culture.

Testing is about understanding your customer and letting them have a voice in the development of their experience. —Mary Kate Cash, Head of Growth Marketing, NA, AB Tasty

6. VR & AR implementation will skyrocket

Brands are offering more interactive experiences that build a strong emotional connection between the consumer and a product. Mimicking in-store experiences like tasting a sample, testing out a potential couch or feeling the softness of a sweater are challenging to replicate digitally, but augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and 3D content help bridge the gap. They can also provide a deeper understanding and attachment to a product that builds trust with consumers and makes the purchasing decision easier.

7. AI will help companies form stronger connections

The adoption of Artificial intelligence is taking off at an unprecedented speed. A study by PwC found that 52% of companies accelerated their AI adoption plans due to Covid. AI will help brands build stronger connections with their customers by personalizing every step in the customer journey.

84% of C-level executives believe that they need to adopt and leverage AI to drive growth objectives.

8. Sustainability will be embedded into CX

Sustainability is an increasingly important part of consumer purchasing decisions, 70% of consumers think it’s important that a brand is sustainable or eco-friendly. In the future, this will be embedded into company culture, products, services and the experience they provide their customers. Consumption will also go beyond buying physical things.

9. Digital accessibility will be prioritized in all channels and experiences

Accessibility isn’t just a trending buzzword—it’s a strategic shift brands across industries will continue to prioritize in 2023. Increasing accessibility will not only increase your audience and expand your opportunities for conversions and additional revenue but also save you from expensive lawsuits and litigation.

In 2022 there were over 4,000 lawsuits regarding digital accessibility, with 77% targeting eCommerce brands.

10. Digital trust and data privacy along the customer journey

Third-party cookies are phasing out, so brands will need to rely on first-party data. This means building trust with customers and finding direct ways to capture customer data is the key to creating meaningful and unique experiences.

We want to be respectful of the trust that consumers give us. And also, be able to come back to them with personalized, unique experiences. —Diana Zaccardi, SVP, Digital Marketing & Base Management, Verizon

Looking for more eCommerce trends? Check out our virtual event, CX circle, for more trends, predictions and insights into the future of CX.

The post 10 eCommerce trends transforming CX in 2023 appeared first on Contentsquare.

But in the rush to replatform, how can brands make sure to avoid the common pitfalls of platform migration? We got some great insights into that at our recent CX circle event in London—courtesy of Jennifer North, Head of Digital at Hobbycraft.

“Replatforming is fun and exciting,” Jennifer told us, “but it’s also a big and hard thing to do. You need to be really ready for it.”

So if you’re planning to replatform yourself, you can prepare by watching Jennifer’s session (‘Replatforming to future-proof Hobbycraft’) on our CX circle on-demand page.

Catch up on all the best of CX circle London

Step into the future of human digital experiences with VICE, Lovehoney, Sky and more leading brands.  

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Alternatively, read on for an insightful round-up of Jennifer’s key points…

Why Hobbycraft replatformed

Hobbycraft is the UK’s leading arts and crafts retailer. You name it—and can use it to craft stuff with—they sell it, supplying consumers with everything they need for art, crochet, haberdashery, papercraft, wedding and party, baking, jewelry making and much, much more.

Jennifer’s digital team oversees a digital catalog of (brace yourself) 23,000 physical products. But just as important as these physical products—from Jennifer’s point of view, at least—is the digital product that drives 20% of Hobbycraft’s total sales: its eCommerce website.

“Nowadays, your digital product is just as important as your physical products and services. It has just as much bearing on your customer outcomes and on determining whether a customer will become loyal to your brand.”—Jennifer North, Head of Digital at Hobbycraft

Hobbycraft’s digital product was built on a legacy platform and had been performing just fine for twelve years. But digital experience was evolving beyond the capacities of the original platform, and there was a danger of Hobbycraft’s digital experience falling behind competitors—and below customer expectations.

“Digital experience is a really interesting space now. It’s less conventional than before—there’s an opportunity to create an experience that people really associate with your brand,” says Jennifer.

To create a truly unique brand experience, and futureproof the brand’s digital experience, Jennifer decided that a radical change was called for: replatforming.

This decision to replatform is one many eCommerce companies are now making. 67% of respondents to Deloitte’s 2022 Retail Industry Outlook survey said eCommerce and online shopping platforms were a top investment priority for their company, citing ongoing issues with old and outdated platforms as a reason to replatform.

Replatforming offers many potential benefits to eCommerce businesses, including improved scalability, integration with modern apps, security, customization, tracking and analytics and—last but far from least—customer experience.

For Jennifer, replatforming was an essential next step for the business. But she knew, having worked on several replatforming projects before, that this was less a small step than a giant leap forward. And it wasn’t going to be easy…

4 tips for solving the biggest eCommerce replatforming challenges

Tip 1: Clarify your replatform goals

Replatforming is a highly complicated process—not to mention a costly one, particularly subject to intense scrutiny from budget owners in these economically straitened times.

Hobbycraft had an​​ expert partner to help them deal with these complexities as they replatformed to Salesforce Commerce Cloud. But regardless of this, as project leader Jennifer had an intense gauntlet of obstacles to negotiate her way through, including redesigning Hobbycraft’s product taxonomy, retraining teams to use the new platform and communicating changes across the entire business.

She also had a dizzying number of decisions to make around UI, UX and prioritizing focus areas—especially with Hobbycraft opting for a ‘big bang’ launch, rather than an agile, iterative approach.

“When you’re replatforming, every day is a debate over details. As the CX leader, you’re making fifty decisions a day. To navigate through that confidently you need to be really clear on what’s important. As lead I decided to work out four key priorities that would help me make those big decisions, at speed.” —Jennifer North, Head of Digital at Hobbycraft

Jennifer’s four priorities included two core deliverables:

• Building great eCommerce journeys for Hobbycraft customers, on both mobile and desktop.
• Designing a new look and feel to reflect Hobbycraft’s status as a creative destination for arts and crafts.

And two differentiators that would make Hobbycraft stand out from the competition:

• Smartly integrating project ideas into customer journeys. Hobbycraft works with influencers and makers to create project ideas that use products they sell on the site. These are key differentiators for Hobbycraft, but they’d never been properly integrated into their customer journey so that they appeared at the right time and the right way.
• Communicating their 1hr click and collect offering: Again, this is a big differentiator for Hobbycraft (who are competing with multi-channel retailers like Amazon, Etsy and Pure Plays) that they were offering already but not communicating adequately to customers.

“For every decision I had to make I could ask ‘will this help us deliver on one of those four priorities?’ If not, it could be put on the back burner for Phase 2. This gave me invaluable clarity of mind when negotiating all those decisions.”—Jennifer North, Head of Digital at Hobbycraft

Jennifer’s approach clearly paid dividends for the project, with the replatforming completed under budget and on time, to (in her words) “the absolute amazement” of Hobbycraft’s directors and private equity owners.

This was cause for celebration, but Jennifer knew from hard experience that there would be no time for her and the team to sit back and bask in their success. Because the real challenge was just beginning—it was time for ‘day one’, the all-important day when the new site would be unveiled to Hobbycraft’s customers.

Now Jennifer and her team would get to find out if the decisions they’d made in planning would work out in practice. And this is where Contentsquare came in…

Tip 2: Have analytics ready to go from day one

As Jennifer told us, during a platform migration project what happens after going live can be treated as something of an afterthought. With all eyes focused on go-live, planning for day (and week, and month) one is put off—until it’s too late.

Knowing this was a big mistake to make, Jennifer kept day one and its aftermath firmly in the front of her mind for months leading up to the replatforming.

“Replatforming projects are so high profile. Your C-Suite and owners are going to want to know what’s happening with their investment from day one. And your customers can be alienated by a site that works completely differently. I knew that we’d need to measure everything on the new site from the minute we went live.” —Jennifer North, Head of Digital at Hobbycraft

Hobbycraft had gone some way to understanding the customer POV on the replatform prior to going live by testing a prototype with some customers—but releasing to the wider customer base was sure to bring up other issues, and performance would need to be closely monitored.

As a small team with limited analytic capabilities, Hobbycraft needed help. Fortunately, they were already working with Contentsquare—we’d already helped them drive 20% eCommerce growth year-on-year with Live Zoning analysis of their website—and so were aware of our replatforming service.

From day one, Contentsquare’s replatform team monitored the new site, regularly liaising with Hobbycraft to share instant insights into its performance, identifying trends in customer behavior and, crucially, the why behind that behavior.

“In the first three weeks, Contentsquare let us know what we needed to fine-tune immediately,” says Jennifer. “As far as the bigger changes go, you need a lot of data to confidently make decisions, so we waited six weeks before we took a deeper dive.”

These early insights into the new site’s performance were invaluable, not only for ensuring that the site’s CX wasn’t suffering (and customer retention wasn’t affected), but also for reassuring Hobbycraft’s leadership team that the replatforming was going well—despite superficial appearances.

“Everyone who’s done a replatforming knows your conversion rate will wobble and your metrics will look a little up and down for a while. Directors and owners don’t understand or like this. So the more you can reassure them that you understand the why, and that you’re in control, the better.” —Jennifer North, Head of Digital at Hobbycraft

And this clarity around the ‘why’ of metrics would prove to be particularly helpful given the unfortunate timing of the new site’s launch.

Tip 3: In tough times, understand what you can and can’t control

The new site launched in mid-March 2022, which certainly wasn’t ideal. The cost of living crisis was hammering consumer confidence in the UK and Hobbycraft lost a significant chunk of organic traffic. “All our metrics were turned upside down overnight”, says Jennifer.

In response, Hobbycraft invested heavily in paid traffic to keep site visits high. “We went from 15% of our traffic coming from Google Shopping to 30%,” says Jennifer. This had a knock-on effect on the sorts of journeys users could be expected to take, since paid adverts often attract users who are lower intent and likely to bounce quicker.

Contentsquare advised Jennifer to highlight this turbulent economic context when reporting on the new site’s performance to leadership. She needed to ensure that replatforming wouldn’t be blamed for discouraging metrics that could (to a large extent) be explained by factors beyond her control.

In the economic climate we all find ourselves in, digital teams will face pressure to justify spending. Analytics tools will be key to taking that pressure off—but only if they can provide rich contextual insights that explain the ‘why’ behind numbers that could be the result of some imperfect UI/UX design, or some wider, overarching economic ‘why’.

Tip 4:  Post replatform, use analytics to prioritize dev focus areas

With Hobbycraft’s new website up and running, Contentsquare continues to provide clarity to Jennifer’s digital team as they work to optimize their digital product in agile development sprints.

In fact, Hobbycraft’s use of Contentsquare has ramped up to support post-replatforming, with Jennifer’s team getting fortnightly deep-dive reports to understand how customers are using the site and what needs to be changed most urgently.

“When your conversion is being challenged by the changes of a replatform and those other external factors I talked about, you have to be really confident that the tasks and changes you’re giving your dev team are the right things to focus on. Contentsquare gives us that confidence.” — Jennifer North, Head of Digital at Hobbycraft

Jennifer likens the process of replatforming to designing and building an “amazing new house” which you (and your customers) move into the day you go live. Once you’re living in your design, you’ll quickly learn that not everything works in practice as you imagined it would on paper.

Jennifer shared five great examples with the CX circle audience of web elements that looked great in design but didn’t work once they went live—including a button placement that was damaging session sign-ins, an over-busy page that was reducing guest checkouts and some copy around gift cards that was causing customers to abandon the payment page.

To learn more about these examples—and how Contentsquare helped Hobbycraft understand why they needed to be redesigned—you’ll have to watch Jennifer’s session for yourself. (Trust us: it’s worth it!)

Manage the risks and reap the rewards of eCommerce replatforming

Replatforming your eCommerce store could be exactly what you need to deliver digital experiences that delight customers and drive sales.

But it’s a risky business at the best of times—and we’re not living in the best of times. In this economic climate, you’ll need to justify the hefty investment required to the business and show that it’s paying off from day one.

That’s why having an analytics tool that can track customer behavior on your replatformed site—not just the clicks, but what happens between them—could be instrumental in bringing both your customers and C-Suite along for the replatforming ride with you.

Contentsquare’s digital experience analytics platform provides a range of features (including Zone-Based Heatmaps, Customer Journey Analysis and Session Replays) that will help you understand how customers are using your replatformed site, with powerful AI dedicated to bringing the most valuable insights to your immediate attention.

With a platform like ours, you can get replatforming right, delivering better experiences for your customers—which, when you consider how important CX is to driving the success of digital businesses,is something that your eCommerce business can’t afford not to do.

If you’re currently considering or planning a replatforming, right now, we’d love to help. Book your personalized demo to learn how Contentsquare can help you make your replatform a success.

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The post How to craft the perfect eCommerce replatforming journey: 4 tips from Hobbycraft appeared first on Contentsquare.