Salomon x Contentsquare
How Salomon relies on Contentsquare to optimize the digital customer experience
The company
Salomon is a French brand founded in 1947 in the Alps in Annecy. Driven by passion and innovation, Salomon is the world leader in sports equipment, covering winter sports such as skiing and snowboarding, footwear such as trail running, running, and hiking, and a wide range of sports apparel and bags.
What makes Salomon unique is its community: A family of outdoor enthusiasts. Now established worldwide, Salomon sells via its eCommerce site, export partners, distributors, and through its brick-and-mortar stores. eCommerce activity for the brand has grown in recent years, placing eCommerce optimizations and improvements at the center of their priorities.
Salomon is using digital experience analytics leader Contentsquare to monitor all of its collections, measure key metrics such as engagement and conversion rate across all website pages, understand the performance of campaigns in order to prioritize A/B tests, test and analyze in-depth the performance of each optimization, detect points of friction along the customer journey, and prioritize ecommerce improvements.
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The challenge
With more than 800 employees in Annecy at their head office, Salomon is sold across the world from North America and Japan to China and Europe. And like many retailers, they launch the majority of their collections online.
For Salomon, the goal is to deliver as seamless and flawless a customer experience as possible. Salomon is currently undergoing a significant global transformation. Until recently, the company operated primarily on a Business-to-Business (B2B) focused business model, relying on a strong network of retailers to market products, particularly for skiing. However, with the rise of digital, the focus has shifted toward developing a Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) strategy through Salomon's own stores.
This shift represents a major transformational challenge, requiring the entire production and marketing chain to become fully consumer-friendly. The ecommerce site is central to this strategy, with ambitious goals to make digital the largest revenue share in the future.
To achieve this, providing the smoothest online experience possible is crucial. Without a flawless customer experience, the D2C goal will not be realized.
The challenge
Defining a flawless online customer experience, and their main business challenges
"Contentsquare makes it possible to open up data to all teams, including those who are not necessarily familiar with data. It also helps us align on our next steps as a team because we can prioritize and make decisions thanks to data"
—Marta Sitkowska, former Global eCommerce Merchandising Manager, Salomon
The solution
How does Contentsquare help you prioritize your roadmap?
Marta Sitkowska, former Global eCommerce Merchandising Manager at Salomon says: "We've been using Contentsquare for three years and onboard each new team member to the platform immediately. We use monthly and seasonal reports, and we always keep an eye on the Contentsquare dashboards. This means we’re able to monitor all of our collections, measuring key metrics such as engagement and conversion rate across all pages. By analyzing the data, we can understand the performance of our campaigns which informs which AB tests we prioritize. We can then test and closely analyze the performance of each optimization. Staying focused on data makes it possible to detect points of friction in our navigation, which helps to justify the changes in conversions we might be seeing on the site."
Thibault chimes in, “On the European side, we need to personalize the experiences because different countries have different purchasing habits. This is where Contentsquare helps us a lot. We track engagement differences by country to build a more personalized and culturally-a igned content experience. For example, we know that we can push cross-country skiing in Finland in December but not in Spain where we’ll promote hiking products instead.”
Sitkowska: “Internally, Contentsquare allows us to be very visual in our analyses. It makes our data much easier to communicate with our teams—especially with snapshots and dashboards—so that even internal teams who are not necessarily familiar with data can digest it. The data also helps us quickly align on our next steps as a team to meet customer expectations.”
What advice would you give your peers when launching new products or new collections?
Thibault: “Anticipate and be agile. You can plan everything, but there will always be unforeseen events. You have to have a mindset of continuous optimization and adjustment because every campaign is different. So, I recommend analyzing and taking a step back; the learnings will help you adapt better in the future.”
How does Contentsquare help you prioritize your roadmap?
Sitkowska: “Contentsquare allows us to be very visual in our analyses. It makes our data much easier to communicate with our teams—especially with snapshots and dashboards.
Thibault: “At Salomon, we avoid making decisions without data. Data helps us in all of our actions. And we always seek to go further. Our analytics teams are working on the implementation of the new merchandising analysis module with the help of Contentsquare. We will therefore, be able to have even more data on this merchandising part, which gives us a new degree of granularity that we’ve not had before.”