The company
The North Face is an outdoor activewear, equipment, and footwear company that’s been providing gear for athletes and modern-day explorers for over 50 years.
What started as a single storefront in the US has since evolved to revolutionize technical performance, acquiring a loyal following among the world’s top mountaineers and extreme sports enthusiasts.
Named for the coldest, most unforgiving side of a mountain, The North Face aims to “push the boundaries of innovation so that you can push the boundaries of exploration”.
It’s this desire to break new ground that led Lisa Skowrup, Senior Manager of Site Experience and Rachel Bonn, Ecommerce Content Manager at The North Face to use our platform to leverage customer experience intelligence ahead of their busiest time of year—the holiday season.
The challenge
The holiday season is one of the biggest retail events of the year for The North Face. Every year in Q4, the company publishes its holiday Gift Guide to showcase the breadth of products on offer and help their customers find the right gift.
The Gift Guide is a major source of digital revenue for the brand. As such, it's typically “soft launched” at the end of October, before peak sales season traffic, so the team can analyze engagement and make any adjustments before the full campaign launch.
The North Face team enlisted Contentsquare's help to analyze the behaviors of early-bird holiday shoppers and then use these learnings to create an improved site experience for all segments before traffic ramped up.
The solution
To learn from early-bird holiday shopper behavior and optimize the Gift Guide before the campaign launch, the team used Contentsquare's Experience Analytics to analyze its performance.
Thanks to Contentsquare's auto capture capability, the team was able to study multiple interaction metrics such as exposure rate, click recurrence, and click-through rate retroactively.
This insight informed the team of user friction points and which page elements were preventing conversions. This data guided the team in making changes to the Gift Guide that helped elevate the customer experience.
For example, the team
1. Increased exposure rate of CTAs by +50%
Using our Heatmaps, the team discovered their hero banner, which featured otherwise highly attractive category calls to action (CTAs), was sitting below the fold. This meant if customers didn’t scroll down, they wouldn’t see the banner and therefore couldn’t interact with the CTAs.
The team used this insight to justify shifting the placement of the CTAs above the fold, which increased the visibility of each category and ultimately improved the exposure rate of key category CTAs by +50%.
Contentsquare’s Heatmaps helped The North Face easily see how customers interact with each element on their digital Gift Guide.
What’s great about Contentsquare is that the insights are visual and extremely easy to digest. It’s particularly helpful to be able to give the creative or leadership team a clear picture of pain points and successes — it helps secure immediate buy-in and significantly reduces time to action, meaning we don’t miss out on potential sales.
2. Optimized the Gift Guide to reduce click recurrence
Looking at the click recurrence metric, the team discovered customers were clicking multiple times on links that navigated to the Women’s Gift Guide page, despite them already being on that page.
Analysis in Contentsquare also revealed customers were constantly clicking on the hero image of the Gift Guide, despite there not being any CTAs on the image. This meant customers were confused, and likely frustrated, about how to access the product shown.
Based on these insights, the team added a header title to the Women’s Gift Guide page, so customers knew that they’d reached their destination. This optimization removed duplicate clicking and gave their customers confidence that they’d reached their destination.
The team also optimized the hero image by making the entire area clickable, which brought the click recurrence rate down from 2.07 to the ideal 1.
3. Re-organized pages based on popular categories
The team analyzed the click-through rate and attractiveness rate of each gift category to determine which were most popular with their customers. They wanted to make sure they were optimizing their pages to give customers what they wanted, faster.
Using this insight, the team re-sequenced the merchandising of the most popular categories. They moved the more attractive categories further up the page, which meant customers didn’t need to scroll to access the more popular items more quickly.
Contentsquare provides us with unique KPIs such as attractiveness rate and click recurrence to measure our storytelling, reduce friction, and improve the experience.
The results
Embedding Contentsquare into The North Face’s Gift Guide for its “soft launch” meant the team was able to improve customer experience before its full campaign launch. This resulted in
+50% increase in exposure rate of key category CTAs
Reduced duplicate clicking and confusion on specific pages
Reduction in the click recurrence rate from 2.07 to 1 on the hero image
Restructuring of specific pages to help customers get to the more popular categories faster.
